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George L. Ives' review of 'So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away'
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Review of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

by George L. Ives?

Brautigan's latest novel should please both old fans and new readers. His admirers will relish the familiar style — broken chronology and fragmented characterization — which carries the reader on a verbal rollercoaster. But the tighter thematic development in this narrative should widen Brautigan's audience. From a mid-life perspective, narrator Whitey recalls his impoverished youth and a fatal choice: whether to buy .22 shells or a hamburger. In his 12-year-old innocence he decides on the bullets, and the choice leads with Sophoclean inevitability to the death of an admired playmate. Confronting death, Brautigan successfully moves his readers to an awareness that life is not an outgrowth of pure randomness but the result of choices willfully made. A fine addition to fiction collections.


Library Journal
August 1982: 1478



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