Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability. If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player Richard Brautigan | The Tokyo-Montana Express Not a novel - but rather 131 autobiographical short takes, about evenly divided in setting between Montana and Tokyo, as Brautigan himself is during the year. True, a good many of these prose poems are insufferably cloying, reductive little lemon drops in Brautigan's familiar virile-winsome style: an afternoon snowfall consisting of just two flakes; umbrellas ("I can't understand why they appear just before it starts to rain"); cats eating cantaloupe; a failed Chinese restaurant; photographing a collection of discarded Christmas trees; a fable of dancing chickadees. Yet what makes Brautigan so awful some of the time - the clipped vagrancy of his attention - often also becomes his greatest strength. There's a grand vignette, for instance, of the writer as bore: Brautigan telephones a friend to report, "Well, I've just been fishing and writing. I've written seven little short stories this week"; and the friend answers, "Nobody cares." Or the lovely moment when Brautigan hears "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" (which he's sung snatches of for decades) over a Tokyo loudspeaker and pays attention to the lyrics for the first time - "as if the words were lumber and a house was being built out of them. When the song was finished, the house was built and then it was my mind on a little side street near the river." Interestingly, the most successful of these laconic notations generally involve Brautigan's confessions of feeling out-of-it now, and indeed these prose munchies - crunchy and wholesome as granola - do often seem dated, forever of the Sixties. Still: a few genuine delights amid the crackerjacks, and sheer pleasure for unquestioning, longtime Brautigan fans. Kirkus Reviews? August 15, 1980: 1093-1094

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