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by Fingerchimp?
this is one of my favourite books. i love richard brautigan and this novel sums up his prose style quite neatly. in it we see an american humourist writer (clearly brautigan) coping with the aftermath of a relationship with a beautiful japanese girl (sounds unlikely if you ever saw a photo of rb but apparently true; he looks a bit like david crosby). he is trying to write and throws a half finished sentence into a bin. he then continues brooding and moping around his apartment while, and heres a typically brautigan twist, the story decides to carry on without him.
what follows is an amazingly poignant and self-indulgent post mortem of the relationship where each moment becomes an eternity set against (chapter by chapter) an unfolding anarchic tale of a bizarre civil war.
what brautigan demonstrates is his feather-light touch, what he really wants to do, one feels, is just to write the post mortem and wallow in his pain but aware that this would not make an interesting book he contrasts this with the story in the bin. the post mortem is treated with incredible solemnity while the unfolding story is treated with hilarity, even when people are violently attacking each other. one story is a micocosm, the other quickly involves the national guard. brautigan deflty intertwines the two totally separate stories to create greater effects by their contrasts... light and dark, funny and sad, fast and slow... just read it, it's so perfectly formed, and it's got a great title. i swear, reading a thing about how so few great comedy actors get oscars that so many great writers are overlooked simply because they are funny too.
take brautigan very seriously, he's fantastic.
BBC Collective?, 273
March 19, 2005
Online source
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