Tristessa — Jack Kerouac

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.