Youth is a different continent, and the book envisioned by a twenty-year-old author is different too. His intuitive, instinctive novel about the loss of innocence, the search for a lost paradise, and the escape from happiness defies genres. It is a romantic story rooted in fantasy, perhaps even a fairy tale with realistic elements... Readers are fascinated precisely because of its strangely hybrid nature. It is a book that influenced Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The plot of this novel touches on a small town in the heart of France and Paris, but the entire story resists closer specification in place and time. It is everywhere and nowhere, coming from nowhere and leading to nowhere. No matter how clearly, precisely, and certainly we see reality, we later realize that what we had before our eyes was merely an echo of the ideas we have long dreamed of. It is also a book about twilight. Whenever there is a joyful mood, we simultaneously feel that darkness will soon envelop the scene. But what is peculiar – by the time we reach the end, we have already forgotten how harsh and cruel the places we passed through in the narrative were and how dark the passages in it are. Sal Paradise, the hero of Kerouac's novel On the Road, took only one book for his three-year journey across America, this very one. He stole it in Hollywood from a book stall and in...
