BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me is a novel by Richard Fariña. First published in the United States in 1966, the novel, based largely on Fariña’s college experiences and travels, is a comic picaresque story that is set in the Western United States, in Cuba during the Cuban Revolution, and at an upstate New York university. The name of the protagonist is Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a modern Odysseus. The book has become something of a cult classic among those who study 1960s or counterculture literature. (More from Wikipedia)
Mimi Fariña is Joan Baez’s younger sister, and Richard Fariña was originally known as a writer and eventually published an acclaimed novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966). As quoted in Wikipedia, novelist Thomas Pynchon, who served as best man at the wedding of the Fariñas, described the novel as “coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch . . . hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful, and outrageous all at the same time.”
(March 2015)
