Name: Recovery
ISBN: 9781560254799

John Berryman

The legendary Minnesota poet's seminal novel of addiction and recovery delves deeply into the humiliations, defeats, and delusions he faces in as he tries to buck his alcoholism. Reprint.

Recovery

Giovanni Garcia-Fenech 

Those of you who know about poetry will know Berryman was a highly esteemed poet; since I don’t know anything about poetry I barely recognized his name. This unfinished “novel” was published a year after the author committed suicide. I use quotation marks because the book is really a thinly disguised diary from Berryman’s (last?) stay at a clinic; there’s little in terms of structure or development to really mark it as a novel. It does have this funny joke: “Do you know about the two drunks who went to the film of The Lost Weekend. Came staggering out. ‘My God I’ll never take another drink,’ said the first. ‘My God I’ll never go to another movie’ [said the other].”