Soft Machine

"The point [of this work] is not to read the book at all, but somehow to hear the voice in it. The voice in The Soft Machine is talking about time....[it] is giving an hallucinatory reading to Eliot's Four Quartets....This is by no means unintentional; Eliot's is one of the rhythms into which the voice in The Soft Machine slips deliberately and frequently, sometimes ironically and sometimes not. Sometimes the voice is not Eliot but Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain....[It] rattles off elliptical allusions, throws away joke after outrageous joke, shifts gear in mid-sentence, never falters. It is precisely this voice--complex, subtle, allusive--that is the fine thing about [this book] and about Burroughs."Burroughs, William S. is the author of 'Soft Machine' with ISBN 9780802133298 and ISBN 0802133290.