The soft machine is the human body under constant siege from a vast hungry host of parasites with many names but one nature being hungry and one intention to eat.
When I first started getting into reading, I was blown away with reading Naked Lunch, which for me is still one of my most memorable reads. I loathed it and loved it so much that I had to read it twice. Burroughs is one of the most divisive writers in literature, just based on his style. There is no in between here, you either love Burroughs, hate him or both (sometimes simultaneously). So it is hard, as I love reading Burroughs, to defend his style. Let’s face it — anybody can replicate his cut-up method, he said so himself. It is something that we did when we were kids in primary school, making collages from magazines.
Reading Burroughs is difficult — there is really no easy Burroughs book. But at the same time, those who try to penetrate the depths of his minds and trying to rearrange the randomness is just going to run into dead ends and won’t enjoy the book. I enjoyed the book the most when I couldn’t give a shit about what I’m reading and I just let Burrough’s words and my brain tussle naturally. It’s like reading a dream. Burroughs are under the influence when he writes, so maybe it is advisable to be on something when you’re digesting the soft machine.
Like most of his writing, most of it will fly by you like a flash, but some of the images and sentences remain vivid. There is a lot of sex here, and they can be both graphic and over the top. Sometimes it is a little too much. Some of his creations just come out of the book of nightmares, like the crabs with human arms, the naked corpses hanging in Mexico, death by centipede, blue heavy metal boys, metal shits. The list goes on.
But reading Burroughs, every page is almost like a trophy. I am guilty of trying to read in a linear fashion and trying to connect the dots from A to B, and it just doesn’t work like that — your brain isn’t trained to think like that. This is frustrating and wonderful at the same time, because you are training your brain to connect random images and words to something that is not comprehensible, but you’re pushing your imagination consciously. Perhaps also, it is best to read non-linearly, open a page at random and stop when you feel like it. Pick it up again from another page. Reread the passage you just read and you might get a different image the second time around.
In some ways, the Soft Machine reads more like poetry than prose. Prose poetry if you want to call it so. But there is not much of a story here. It is a mess of interconnected characters trying to score and screw each other, random words and segments splashed into a paragraph, quotes and stories. The rules of grammar is out the window, and either your brain keeps up or gets stuck in the mud.
Personally, I enjoy Burroughs (and other beatnik writers) when I read the prose aloud. There is something savage about the tone of Burroughs writing, wild as fuck and unapologetic. There is music to this wildness. The Soft Machine is not for everybody, but for those who are familiar with Burroughs and his style, the book delivers exactly as you expect.
