The Last Museum

Gysin's last, brief novel -- he died the year it was published -- is a dark epistle of expectation. As he imagines it, Paris' old, crumbling Beat Hotel is now run as a bardo by Buddhist monks, a physical manifestation of the spiritual stages in which individuals have the opportunity to achieve enlightenment. The story and its' characters move upward, from first-floor room to ascending floors, and Gysin's fantasia weaves East and West together, fusing hallucinatory tales of sexual debauchery, ancient myth, and the Word. The story is dense with literary allusion and wordplay; there are scraps of poetry, fiction, and scripture of all kinds on every page. The Dalai Lama, Apollo, Hassan-i-Sabbah and Gertrude Stein all make appearances in this cultural approximation of Gysin's literary cut-up style, and along the way there's a money-mad rock-star simian named Mickey Monkey whose father may or may not be William Burroughs. (Quoting one of Burroughs' more famous observations in the text, "you have to take a broad, general view of things"). The novel is an edited version of a larger manuscript Gysin intended to call "Beat Museum-Bardo Hotel," which remains unpublished. What's presented here is, still, a literary tour-de-force. It's Gysin's valedictory, and at the end the author himself seems tired of life's own pyrotechnics: "A story like this can have no happy ending," he writes. "Or can it?" This may not be every reader's idea of an inspirational message, but for Brion Gysin it was enough.