Richard Brautigan The Abortion (1971)
Having thus far failed to come up with a convincing comparison, I've at last realised who Brautigan reminds me of with this one, and it's Borges. The language and the mood are both very different to anything I've read of the Argentinian, but there's common ground in their both having fixated on the written word and language as reality, or as something distinct from reality. Half of Sombrero Fallout, for example, occurs on scraps of paper discarded and tossed into a waste paper basket by a frustrated writer, while The Abortion sets out its stall in a library and features librarians as its main characters; and because it's Brautigan, it's a library of unpublished books, an institution which, rather than being built or founded, seems to have come into existence in organic response to some obscure need within the culture at large. The librarians here are people who ended up in the job without quite meaning to, having mostly just wandered in off the street; and unpublished authors turn up with their manuscripts - typed or handwritten - and add them to the library, sometimes at three in the morning.
Our story begins when Vida shows up with the book she's written about her own body, specifically how she doesn't understand it or particularly relate to it, which is a shame because it's apparently a great body - as Brautigan describes in some detail. Vida has sex with the narrator, becomes pregnant, and so we come to the reason for the title. I wouldn't say alarm bells were quite ringing by this point, but I had my fingers crossed, hoping to avoid a descent into mansplaining and what men may or may not think about abortion. I've seen online criticism of The Abortion suggesting that Brautigan spends a little longer than seems necessary describing Vida's tits and is therefore an oppressive phallocrat of some description, which is, I suppose, one reaction. Of course, the logical extreme of such arguments are that whatever a man may have to say on the topic of abortion will be essentially worthless. I agree in so much as that the casting vote should probably go to the person whose body is directly under discussion, but worthless is too great a reduction which as such seems based on the gender of the speaker more than on the actual potential worth - or otherwise - of anything said. Additionally, human biology is such that certain female physical features have a fucking powerful effect on certain males, and while I recognise that no-one should reduce another person to a mere object, whining about it is probably a waste of time. I guess Brautigan liked boobs, and I also like boobs, none of which necessarily gets in the way of anything else The Abortion may strive to achieve.
Returning to Borges, the library of The Abortion seems to inhabit its own reality, which is something slightly separate from regular reality. Vida is likewise divorced to a certain extent from her own body, which is what her book is about. Brautigan's book is therefore about regular reality imposing itself on those otherwise maintaining some distance from the same, something which tends to happen whether we like it or not - see also certain aspects of human biology. I don't have anything profound or worthwhile to say about abortion, and Brautigan reports without necessarily saying anything beyond that which we mostly know and understand to be approximately true, and so, writing without any of the usual hysteria, manages to avoid shooting himself in the foot as Philip K. Dick did with The Pre-Persons.
The Abortion is, perhaps paradoxically, quite life affirming for something which really could have gone horribly wrong; or at least I found it so.
Having thus far failed to come up with a convincing comparison, I've at last realised who Brautigan reminds me of with this one, and it's Borges. The language and the mood are both very different to anything I've read of the Argentinian, but there's common ground in their both having fixated on the written word and language as reality, or as something distinct from reality. Half of Sombrero Fallout, for example, occurs on scraps of paper discarded and tossed into a waste paper basket by a frustrated writer, while The Abortion sets out its stall in a library and features librarians as its main characters; and because it's Brautigan, it's a library of unpublished books, an institution which, rather than being built or founded, seems to have come into existence in organic response to some obscure need within the culture at large. The librarians here are people who ended up in the job without quite meaning to, having mostly just wandered in off the street; and unpublished authors turn up with their manuscripts - typed or handwritten - and add them to the library, sometimes at three in the morning.
Our story begins when Vida shows up with the book she's written about her own body, specifically how she doesn't understand it or particularly relate to it, which is a shame because it's apparently a great body - as Brautigan describes in some detail. Vida has sex with the narrator, becomes pregnant, and so we come to the reason for the title. I wouldn't say alarm bells were quite ringing by this point, but I had my fingers crossed, hoping to avoid a descent into mansplaining and what men may or may not think about abortion. I've seen online criticism of The Abortion suggesting that Brautigan spends a little longer than seems necessary describing Vida's tits and is therefore an oppressive phallocrat of some description, which is, I suppose, one reaction. Of course, the logical extreme of such arguments are that whatever a man may have to say on the topic of abortion will be essentially worthless. I agree in so much as that the casting vote should probably go to the person whose body is directly under discussion, but worthless is too great a reduction which as such seems based on the gender of the speaker more than on the actual potential worth - or otherwise - of anything said. Additionally, human biology is such that certain female physical features have a fucking powerful effect on certain males, and while I recognise that no-one should reduce another person to a mere object, whining about it is probably a waste of time. I guess Brautigan liked boobs, and I also like boobs, none of which necessarily gets in the way of anything else The Abortion may strive to achieve.
Returning to Borges, the library of The Abortion seems to inhabit its own reality, which is something slightly separate from regular reality. Vida is likewise divorced to a certain extent from her own body, which is what her book is about. Brautigan's book is therefore about regular reality imposing itself on those otherwise maintaining some distance from the same, something which tends to happen whether we like it or not - see also certain aspects of human biology. I don't have anything profound or worthwhile to say about abortion, and Brautigan reports without necessarily saying anything beyond that which we mostly know and understand to be approximately true, and so, writing without any of the usual hysteria, manages to avoid shooting himself in the foot as Philip K. Dick did with The Pre-Persons.
The Abortion is, perhaps paradoxically, quite life affirming for something which really could have gone horribly wrong; or at least I found it so.
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