Description
first edition published by Calder & Boyars in 1965 , translated from Dutch by Alex Trocchi and R.E. Wyngaard. First published in Holland in 1964 where it became a cult classic.
Condition VG : No marking , DJ unclipped but rubbed but no significant flaws.
From back cover, “Who is Jan Cremer? A young Dutchman, a hipster, a beat, a non-conformist par excellence, an enfant terrible who cocks a snook at Society and points in this raucous, roaring, bawdy imaginative autobiography at the weaknesses and conceits of himself and his fellow-men. Born into a poor family, brought up fatherless, he soon finds himself in trouble with the law and spends the better part of his childhood in reform schools.
Undisciplined and contemptuous of anything that smacks of authority he runs away and begins his brawling Odyssey through post-war Europe, going from rags to riches and back to rags again, exploiting and being exploited, stealing, pimping, prostituting himself, hopelessly idle, insolent, yet seeing himself as an artist, eventually, who will astonish the world which he so clearly despises. His adventures are too fantastic to be true, but are they not the stuff the dreams of adolescents are made of? He is a cynical, shrewd child of the streets, an underdog by birth in a complacent, placid smug Dutch society, who is determined to make the world his oyster and succeeds.
Cremer has been called the ‘crazy sixties’, illegitimate son of such giants of imaginative autobiography as Celine, Henry Miller, Genet. This book is designed to shock and to make the author a lot of money – which it has. In Holland alone it has sold more than 250,000 copies, and Jan Cremer has become a household word, a god to the teen-agers, a naughty, disgusting hip to the bourgeoisie. In this English version, edited by Alexander Trocchi, the world of Jan Cremer, the world of teenage hipsterism, has found its authentic expression.”
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