Based on Jack Kerouac's real-life love affair in Mexico City, this novel follows a man's doomed relationship with a woman as her life spirals out of control.

"[Kerouac] loves language, and he obviously has a profound feeling for the human race... In the end he is more truthful, entertaining, and honest than most writers on the American scene." -- The New York Times Book Review

This short novel, which Jack Kerouac wrote in the mid-1950s, tells of an American man's ill-fated romance with an exotic, happy-go-lucky Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. Tristessa, who is Indian, and a deeply religious Catholic, lives in a room in a Mexico City slum with another addict and a menagerie of pets. After meeting her, the narrator leaves town for a year to travel in America, and upon his return he finds Tristessa beginning to fall apart at the seams.

This elegiac novel is both a haunting evocation of a spectral Mexico City and a moving meditation on a young woman's pain and suffering.

• We started tracking this book on January 26, 2013.
• This book was $11.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 86 times in the past 4,347 days.
• The current price of this book is $4.99 last checked 23 hours ago.
• The lowest price to date was $4.99 last reached on October 13, 2024.
• This book has been $4.99 6 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $12.99 last reached on September 5, 2022.
• This book has been $12.99 7 times since we started tracking it.
• This book is currently at its lowest price since we started tracking it.

• Literature & Fiction

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 98 Pages
• File Size: 435 KB