What is his work like? Carroll, Calvino, Pynchon?
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Richard Brautigan
What is his work like? Carroll, Calvino, Pynchon?
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He’s kinda in a class of his own. I’ve only read one book of his though. He’s a very unique writer. Sort of a slur between Hemingway and surrealism set in the counterculture era which bleeds through. A lot of metaphors can be seen through the surrealistic writing
bingo
think Vonnegut if he adopted more of that Hemingway-surrealist blur
i’d say a bit of Barth as well but Brautigan certainly never set out to craft the vast ornate experiments Barth came to be known for
I don't think I would group him with surrealism and OP's suggestion of Calvino is right on the money, his surrealism is more a playful bit of metafiction than the surreal much like Calvino.
I’ve admittedly never read Calvino so I wouldn’t know. Perhaps surrealism is too strong a word as he isn’t in the mold of Rimbaud and the like, but Brautigan does have a childlike otherworldness to him
Absolutely, I just think the surrealism is a side effect of his weird little metafictional vagueness for the most part, he does have times where he has played with the outright surreal like Trout Fishing in American or his short stories where he often shows a fair amount of Kafka influence, but overall I don't think he has much in common with the surrealists.
Calvino is like Brautigan but more refined (academically speaking) and lacking the depressive streak. I prefer Brautigan but Calvino is wonderful and up there for me.
I’ve only read TFIA so maybe that’s why I have that impression. It’s funny you mention the depressive streak because the reason I dropped it when I was almost finished is because I found it too depressing, and I’ve read some seriously depressing and disturbing books with no issue before. If anything, I think that speaks to Brautigans credit, to create that vibe or atmosphere that can unsettle someone. There’s only a few books where I’ve gotten that feeling. One was Unclay by TF Powys. It is a satire that is comedic, but there were seriously depressing moments and evil brushed off in a lighthearted manner, and I found it to be really unsettling.
Jump ahead to So The Wind Won't Blow it All Away if you want depressing but toned down depressing, Sombrero Fallout if you want depression as a part of life we all go through and move on from, In Watermelon Sugar if you want as little depression as possible, and An Unfortunate Woman if you are ready to die or just want a very good look at the mind of someone about to eat their shotgun.
The book I have has The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar, along with TFIA, so maybe I’ll check out IWS next. As an aside I’ve always thought So The Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is a great title
IWS is where he starts to move away from the surreal and we really see how the surreal was more a side effect for him, in this case a side effect of his use of symbolism; the meta enters and the symbolism is reworked and more restrained. This is where he figures out who he was as a writer and sorts out his style, although he does fumble a but after IWS as he tries to put all the pieces together.
Calvino is like Brautigan except far more boring.
Really? Brautigan is tedious to read sometimes. Calvino is fun.
>Calvino is fun
You must a really boring simpleton.
You must be a depressed jaded homosexual
His own thing. Calvino's playfulness, Hemingway's simplicity. His minimalism is fairly different than Hemingway's but there is a definite influence.
Brautigan was too hippy for any of these fricking comparisons. It's kind of embarrassing how all these posts tear and strain to explain it.
Counter culture was used to describe him in this thread
He really is one of the few writers where the word "unique" makes sense.
Honestly what his work reminds me of the most is my schizophrenic friend. The way that he will start a sentence but then magically leap somewhere halfway through and land in an idea where you have no idea how he got there.
Not sure how much of it was art for brautigan and how much was just channeling deep schizo energy
No magic about it, he is very logical in the things he did. You probably read Trout Fishing in America, so the below may interest you.
Trout Fishing in America is avant garde and not a good entry to Brautigan for those who are not interested in such things. He is playing with the idea of symbols and how we can make anything into a symbol for anything, he takes it to the extreme and has one symbol that means everything and anything and he complicates things by exploring the symbol itself in both the literal and the figurative. It is a fairly easy book to read, especially by avant garde standards but it is not an easy book to figure out since what "Trout Fishing in America" the symbol means is constantly changing, it modifies itself and is modified, it evolves and grows, and it becomes more than just a symbol.
>Trout Fishing in America is avant garde and not a good entry to Brautigan for those who are not interested in such things. He is playing with the idea of symbols and how we can make anything into a symbol for anything, he takes it to the extreme and has one symbol that means everything and anything and he complicates things by exploring the symbol itself in both the literal and the figurative
oh neat, I like when Nobokov did the same in the very brief short 'Signs and Symbols'
Brautigan is considerably more extreme about it, it reads like a collection of short stories which is only connected by the symbol with what it symbolizes in a given chapter alluding to something more.
He was an institutionalized schizo. He was channeling his artistic brilliance and his schizophrenia, similar to Blake, Artaud, PKD, among others
By most (if not all accounts) he was just half starved and desperate and probably a little angry about no one being willing to help him out and having to sell his typewriter, so he broke the window of a police station so he would be arrested and fed. There is nothing schizo about his writing.
> There is nothing schizo about his writing
Well you’re certainly a genuine moron in contending that schizophrenics have an obvious style of writing. I guess when you are so stupid it would be impossible to see how one suffering from a debilitating mental illness could be impacted by such in their writing.
>t. schizo
Not a truly avid reader, I have read a lot compared to people who almost never read anything, not much compared to true bookworms.
At about 25 y.o. I read Infinite Jest, was amazed and challenged by it, then found some dfw recommended reading list. I read the one of his about trouts or something.
Felt like a prank. Each page a chore to read, not funny in the slightest. But maybe some key element flew over my head, I'm just sharing how it felt.
English is not my first language, although that wasn't a problem with IJ, the challenge was in the book itself. Maybe still I'm missing a lot of cultural context of English literature
He's like if Mark Twain was writing a dream
Carroll's probably the closest of the three. The absurdist logic is sound when he uses it which makes a lot of his jokes hit harder than Calvino or Pynchon. Carroll's influences were obviously a bit more Victorian but the popular culture thing still holds, just instead it's a lot of references to a later period's popular culture.
The logic of a lot of his jokes or characters is painfully precise at times. I don't mean this as a bad thing, but he can take WYSIWYG to a lawyerly level. If something is introduced as an insoluble mystery, it's insoluble and will remain a mystery because don't you know what words mean; if something is introduced as a character trait, it will be a trait so pervasive when it becomes relevant again he'll almost hit you over the head for thinking you can forget the obvious and only trait the character had. Not everything is Chekhov's gun, but if he describes something it's very precisely what he meant, so when something is a Chekhov's gun situation, he's going to make it fire exactly as you should have expected. The genius of it is he can make it surprising and painful when it does go off, and, much like Carroll, that relies on the logic being cast iron enough you feel foolish for coming up with a contingency that wouldn't work within the framework you've been given.
>Chekhov's gun
He sort of fires it off the second it is introduced on the first page and lets it ricochet around the novel for 250 pages he contemplates Chekhov's hamburger. He is a trick shot.