Satori in Paris

Satori in Paris is a 1966 novella by American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac. It is a short, autobiographical tale of Kerouac's trip to Paris, then Brittany, to research his genealogy. Kerouac relates his trip in a tumbledown fashion as a lonesome traveler. Little is said about the research that he does, and much more about his interactions with the French people he meets. Although Kerouac was fluent in a form of Quebec French called Joual, Kerouac's French would not only have seemed heavily accented, but would also have contained hundreds of odd words that would mark him as a foreigner to the French.