I love Brautigan’s poetry. The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is great.

This is a collection of three short works. The first, Trout Fishing in America, is a surrealistic ‘novel’, a collection of short, often brilliant vignettes, ostensibly on the subject of trout fishing in america – but is that an activity, a person, a place? It’s a bizarre thing to read, but has tiny crystaline moments of perfection in it. Imagine a trout stream stacked up in a junkyard to be bought by the metre. Do I need to say anything more?

The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster is a collection of poems which, despite having some of the aforementioned perfection crystals in it, is mostly raw thoughts decanted from a head, and therefore less than satisfying.

In Watermelon Sugar is another novel, again surrealistic. While this one does arguably contain a ‘coherent’ story line, it is, on the bottom line, mostly strange and incomprehensible. At least to me. I guess it sort of feels like it was written with bongwater…

So read Trout Fishing in America if you’ve any taste for that sort of thing. The other two you’re probably safe to skip.

I’m actually just re-reading Trout Fishing in America, but all three of the books in this collection are wonderful, whimsical stories and poems.

Weird, wacky stuff. Brautigan is one of those writers I’d never heard of before (until I read Jessamyn), and now I wonder why. Though in the end I couldn’t finish it and returned it to the library too.