ain’t that the truth

Recently read an omnibus (pluribus?) edition of Richard Brautigan’s “Revenge of the lawn”, “The Abortion: An historical Romance”, and “So the wind won’t blow it all away”. And,  since I have not been publishing for awhile, and since I have reasonably strong opinions on these books, I felt that I would write about them and my opinions. Sort of like a review, but more like an in review.

And that (and this) right there (here) is one of the things I (like)d about this guy.  He has, in terms of sentences, a real knack for ignoring the rules of common decency and just saying the thing that gets his point across. A mixing of tense and form to create a syntactic emotion. He writes innocent, like a five-year-old, with too much enthusiasm and too-bright descriptions. But the sensation that I get from it, and the reason that I like it so much I think, is one of warmth and affection, instead of what I would expect from my description: uncomfortable style and affectation.

First thing in this book, direction wise: “Revenge of the Lawn”: a collection of (extremely) short pseudo-fiction.  Actually, I’m not sure that that’s true. I have no idea how much of these stories are true and how much of them are just pleasant little descriptions of events that he witnessed or remembered. Frankly, I don’t care. They’re pleasant, or upsetting, whichever they were intended as, but not much more. This is starting to sound too much like a review.

So. “The Abortion.” This is, I think, what every man (the occasional man) dreams of as the perfect romance. A man, understanding his part of the world the best that any man could possibly understand it, meets a(n overwhelmingly) beautiful girl and is the only one to understand her beauty correctly. The thing is, “understand” is my particular interpretation. It’s probably the wrong word for you. This novel is a picture of various ways of fitting in the world, and it’s a superb dream of satisfaction and normality.

“So The Wind Won’t Blow it All Away” so that you understand where I’m coming from: the past is simultaneously immutable and already destroyed. It is exactly where you put it and it is exactly what you remember, and except that your memories are what you remember them to be and the past is only sometimes what you want it to be. A reconstruction of a winter afternoon in a summer afternoon previous.

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