Richard Brautigan A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964)
Brautigan's first novel is maybe a little more raggedy around the edges than those he went on to write, but you nevertheless could never mistake it for the work of anyone else. The dry humour is as deeply ingrained in the narrative as ever, with the story being told at the usual tangent to anything the rest of us might regard as reality. The deal here is that one Lee Mellon is the contemporary descendant of a Confederate general, except the general never existed so far as anyone can tell and neither did any of the other allegedly historical foundations upon which Brautigan builds his world of low-level west coast dropouts and amiable losers. Their reality is haphazard, often comical, but sort of heartfelt by terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever read a Freak Brothers comic book. In fact, it's almost Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly but with much softer, more gentle drugs, and hence without the paranoia.
The Confederacy, as was, has become something of a hot topic of late, and not without good reason, suggesting the potential for dunderheads to miss the point of this book; but as ever, Brautigan arranges people and places within situations without editorial or moral commentary, at least assuming that his reader isn't a fucking idiot, which is nice.
I first read The Hawkline Monster when I was nineteen. How the fuck has it taken me this long to catch up?
Brautigan's first novel is maybe a little more raggedy around the edges than those he went on to write, but you nevertheless could never mistake it for the work of anyone else. The dry humour is as deeply ingrained in the narrative as ever, with the story being told at the usual tangent to anything the rest of us might regard as reality. The deal here is that one Lee Mellon is the contemporary descendant of a Confederate general, except the general never existed so far as anyone can tell and neither did any of the other allegedly historical foundations upon which Brautigan builds his world of low-level west coast dropouts and amiable losers. Their reality is haphazard, often comical, but sort of heartfelt by terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever read a Freak Brothers comic book. In fact, it's almost Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly but with much softer, more gentle drugs, and hence without the paranoia.
The Confederacy, as was, has become something of a hot topic of late, and not without good reason, suggesting the potential for dunderheads to miss the point of this book; but as ever, Brautigan arranges people and places within situations without editorial or moral commentary, at least assuming that his reader isn't a fucking idiot, which is nice.
I first read The Hawkline Monster when I was nineteen. How the fuck has it taken me this long to catch up?
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