Richard Brautigan So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982)
This was Brautigan's final novel, one which supposedly foreshadows his suicide in 1984 - which I don't quite buy. So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is told from the perspective of a twelve-year old boy who accidentally shoots his only friend and spends the rest of his life regretting that he didn't spend what little money he had on a hamburger rather than bullets on that unfortunate day. If not without humour, it's nevertheless a solemn, introspective novel lamenting the advent of a world which no longer makes so much sense as it once did, and while the author did indeed shoot himself in the head, two whole years had passed and you could pick almost anything from Brautigan's body of work as a foreshadowing of his demise.
Of those I've read, of all Brautigan's novels this one does seem a little more specific in its focus, less-meandering than he can be; and it's a sombre read with its doubtless autobiographical focus on extremes of poverty and the impermanence of existence, hence - I suppose - the somewhat tenuous suggestion that it could count for a suicide note. Whatever the case may have been, it's an astonishing and powerful piece of writing which once again raises the question of how Brautigan, whose voice is nothing if not distinctive to the point of being absolutely his own, managed to keep from repeating himself or writing the same novel over and over. I suspect had he been writing a couple of decades earlier, his posthumous reputation would have been colossal by this point.
This was Brautigan's final novel, one which supposedly foreshadows his suicide in 1984 - which I don't quite buy. So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is told from the perspective of a twelve-year old boy who accidentally shoots his only friend and spends the rest of his life regretting that he didn't spend what little money he had on a hamburger rather than bullets on that unfortunate day. If not without humour, it's nevertheless a solemn, introspective novel lamenting the advent of a world which no longer makes so much sense as it once did, and while the author did indeed shoot himself in the head, two whole years had passed and you could pick almost anything from Brautigan's body of work as a foreshadowing of his demise.
Of those I've read, of all Brautigan's novels this one does seem a little more specific in its focus, less-meandering than he can be; and it's a sombre read with its doubtless autobiographical focus on extremes of poverty and the impermanence of existence, hence - I suppose - the somewhat tenuous suggestion that it could count for a suicide note. Whatever the case may have been, it's an astonishing and powerful piece of writing which once again raises the question of how Brautigan, whose voice is nothing if not distinctive to the point of being absolutely his own, managed to keep from repeating himself or writing the same novel over and over. I suspect had he been writing a couple of decades earlier, his posthumous reputation would have been colossal by this point.
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