In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan Summary and Reviews
|
Our Price: $8.32 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $8.31 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of In Watermelon Sugar
Book Review: Sugary Bliss
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm not going to say a whole lot, but this is now one of my top 3 favorite books. Love it. It's dreamy, beautiful, sweet, sad, hollering, ambiguous, stands where it wants to stand and ends far too soon, just as it should.Book Review: The Incredible Vanishing Clothes Pin
Summary: 4 Stars
Back in the 1970s, I always liked reading Richard Brautigan's novels and stories. I would hang out my thoughts in the Atlantic winds with a clothes pin. They would wave and whip about, slowing drying into crystals. Sometimes seagulls would carry them away. They would drop the crystals on the beach to be carried home by tourists. "How interesting !" I would always think, "Brautigan comes up with stuff that nobody else bothers with. It's too simple for them. They want sex, violence, and twisted plots. But he sees the sheer poetry of life and captures all the haiku moments so well."
I liked ZAP Comix too. It was the era of Mr. Natural. To quote Heinlein "I grokked it in all its fullness." Over the course of my life since then, I lost that clothes pin. It vanished. Maybe it just melted into ear wax or was stolen by the same raccoon who steals stuff out of my garbage every week. Now I like Brautigan's simple humor and clear, plain writing. But IN WATERMELON SUGAR is not very funny. In fact, it is weird, depicting, as in a dream, a kind of (maybe) post-apocalyptic world where nothing is as it seems, even metaphors that vanish into thin air. A strange allegory for sad, complicated times. The Forgotten Works and the useless, formless stuff in there is our crazy, materialist life, but a lot of the tale is not really understandable. You have to approach it from what is already within you. It is the least accessible of all Brautigan's books, I think. You have to hang out your thoughts just as you find them---love, revenge, death, and sacrifice in a very modest world where all the tigers are dead and people live in a commune called iDEATH. Maybe you've got a topnotch clothes pin. If you do, you're going to love this book. Otherwise you might wind up scratching your head. We can't really write dreams, but if anyone could, it would have been Brautigan.
Book Review: This is such a great book....
Summary: 5 Stars
I think that this is one of those books that people try to overanalyze, which is a shame. This isn't a book that will change you as a person, there are enough of those out there, this is simply a book that will make you appreciate beauty. You feel how beautiful Ideath is, and by extension, you appreciate how beautiful our world is. That seems to be Brautigan's goal throughout all of his novels, and his poetry- simplicity and beauty. It works.Book Review: in watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is amazing. Myterious and Creative. Be ready to not understand everyhting though, but it's wonderful nonetheless. Read it!Book Review: the deeds were done and done again . . .
Summary: 4 Stars
Since the 40th anniversary of the publication of "In Watermelon Sugar" is just around the bend, it might be a good time to look back. Seems like we were all reading this little book in the year after the "Summer of Love", at least out here on the west coast. I remember being handed this little paperback with the words "It's real trippy, man".
This is Brautigan's dreamscape in poetic verse. The child-like prose is pretty close to reading a fairy tale. Brautigan hands the meaning of "In Watermelon Sugar" over to the reader - it's you who gets to decide the who and what of this story. Wow, trippy, man.
So, just what is Watermelon Sugar a metaphor for? Well, on page 38 we find: "We take the juice from the watermelons and cook it down until there's nothing left but sugar, and then we work it into the shape of this thing that we have: our lives"
The first part of this little book is all about tigers eating the author's parents; his arrival at this strange little commune place named
iDEATH; and his shacking up with a hippie chick named Pauline. The trout in the river have something to do with Watermelon Sugar but that could also have something to do with leftovers from Brautigan's first book.
The second part is about the bad people at iDEATH and how they eliminate themselves so that the author can resume making love to Pauline and get on with the writing of "In Watermelon Sugar".
Yep, we were all guilty of making Richard Brautigan rich so that he could go on writing some pretty mediocre stuff. His fellow writers didn't think much of Brautigan's writing abilities; but the publishers sure loved him for his sales potential. Anyway, if you've got an hour or two to kill, you could whiz though this little tale of how all the deeds were done and done again in watermelon sugar. What the hell . . .
Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts
The Cloud Reckoner
More In Watermelon Sugar reviews:
1 2
1 2