Richard Brautigan In Watermelon Sugar (1968)
Friends have dropped hints about Richard Brautigan ever since I borrowed and enjoyed The Hawkline Monster from Reuben back in the early eighties, and yet somehow I never took those hints. Then I read Sombrero Fallout in 2017, which was great, and then I found this so I suppose you could say I'm picking up the pace, a bit.
In Watermelon Sugar seems to occur in a rural agrarian post-society community. A few online sources describe it as post-apocalypse, but there's probably too much in the way of weird mythology woven through the thing for it to be taken quite so literally - notably the talking tigers and watermelon sugar itself, an improbably versatile building medium derived from watermelons. The name of the community is iDEATH, which is never explained, and nor is the logographically similar name of inBOIL, the bad guy of the piece, or at least the local undesirable. There isn't actually much which is explained in In Watermelon Sugar because it's mostly language stripped down to its most functional in order to describe actions and their consequences, which lends the narrative a thoroughly folksy rhythm. Brautigan isn't going to assume anything here, beyond that readers will most likely be quite capable of forming their own emotions without him having to spell anything out.
The economy of the telling yields a story which feels both mythic and yet with a solid grounding in reality one doesn't often encounter in works of fiction. It's so free of embellishment and unnecessary frippery that it feels real, which actually makes for a truly peculiar and powerful read.
Consider the hint taken.
Friends have dropped hints about Richard Brautigan ever since I borrowed and enjoyed The Hawkline Monster from Reuben back in the early eighties, and yet somehow I never took those hints. Then I read Sombrero Fallout in 2017, which was great, and then I found this so I suppose you could say I'm picking up the pace, a bit.
In Watermelon Sugar seems to occur in a rural agrarian post-society community. A few online sources describe it as post-apocalypse, but there's probably too much in the way of weird mythology woven through the thing for it to be taken quite so literally - notably the talking tigers and watermelon sugar itself, an improbably versatile building medium derived from watermelons. The name of the community is iDEATH, which is never explained, and nor is the logographically similar name of inBOIL, the bad guy of the piece, or at least the local undesirable. There isn't actually much which is explained in In Watermelon Sugar because it's mostly language stripped down to its most functional in order to describe actions and their consequences, which lends the narrative a thoroughly folksy rhythm. Brautigan isn't going to assume anything here, beyond that readers will most likely be quite capable of forming their own emotions without him having to spell anything out.
The economy of the telling yields a story which feels both mythic and yet with a solid grounding in reality one doesn't often encounter in works of fiction. It's so free of embellishment and unnecessary frippery that it feels real, which actually makes for a truly peculiar and powerful read.
Consider the hint taken.
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