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Simon Hall's review of 'An Unfortunate Woman'
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Ghost Laid to Rest: A Review of An Unfortunate Woman

by Simon Hall?

The achingly elliptical and sometimes stunning An Unfortunate Woman seems on the one hand to bear all the hallmarks of a typical Brautigan novel. It rubbishes the notion that narrative should be streamlined and proceed with a minimum of digressionary hindrance towards some sort of a conclusion. It is heavy with introspective reflection and dark themes, yet remains buoyant with lyrical nature poetry and brilliant, electric humour.

Brautigan dispenses altogether with linear time, confessing his book to be "chronologically mischievous". It includes scripted dialogue between reader and author and a coda in which he thanks the Pilot Pen company for manufacturing the pens with which he wrote the manuscript. All the playful conventions and surface whimsicality of the post-modern novel are here, but this is also a deliberately garbled travelogue, an exploration of the jumbled confusion that is memory and the autobiographical memoir of a writer spiralling inevitably towards his suicide in 1984.

An Unfortunate Woman does lack the sustained energy and cohesion of some of Brautigan's other writings and, while there is a great deal here that will delight anyone who has enjoyed this author in the past, I can't quite agree with the publishers' assertion that this is a "long-lost masterpiece".


The Herald [Glasgow]
July 20, 2000



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