He heard the sound of his own drummer

books:


	• Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, the Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster: And in Watermelon ... Richard Brautigan Delacorte Pr, 1968 average customer review:based on 36 reviews
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highly recommended

Brautigan's Style is 5 star for me.

I have read just about all of Brautigan's books, and never with disappointment. They are all so good that it is hard to pick a favorite. .-- Sam Yulish, author of WHERE HAVE ALL THE HIPPIES GONE and THE HESITANT PSYCHIC AND OTHER STRANGE STORIES.

He heard the sound of his own drummer

The man is no longer here so its necessary to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Brautigan was in the long tradition of American originals. Thoreau defined it as the person who can't walk in step with the others because he 'hears the sound of his own drummer'.
Brautigan put a number of things together. A kind of clearness in telling about what he was seeing right before him. A kind of whimsical random associativeness which broke up the prose line, and often make it feel as if what was on the page had nothing to do with what had come before it or after it. And most savingly, a kind of humor , this very much connected with the going his own way, and displacing things and putting them in strange order. Surprise. He also had a closeness to America, whether he liked it or not.
I agree with many of the readers about his big problem being that he often seemed to not really know or care what he was talking about. Writing was his business, and whatever came to him that's what made it on the page. So it seems.
But he had a kind of lightness with it all, and he could really sometimes make the reader laugh, which in my opinion, is saying a lot.
I do not know what he really believed, unfortunately.
Reading him is like taking a ride in an amusement park. You enjoy it but you are not exactly sure you know why. And in the end it is not something that is going to stay with you in the strongest way.
Enjoy the reading while you are reading it- and don't expect too much more.

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Hallucinatory, and Great

Of the three books in this volume, two are classics: Trout Fishing and The Pill.

The third, In Watermelon Sugar, is surreal (OK, MORE surreal) and interesting as an experiment, but not as interesting as the first two.

Trout Fishing comes in a straight line from Whitman and Ginsberg, as modified by Hemingway and Hammett: spontaneity and absolute lack of inhibition, tempered by gemlike use of language.

Funny and eye-opening by turns, the two books redefine fiction and make poetry approachable, simple, Zenlike, and humorous.

Both are pies-in-the-face of pretension and academia. One of the best poems in The Pill Versus is the one about being Poet-in-Residence at Cal Tech: I'm bored, and there's nothing to do.

Do not expect character development or linear plots (or any plots).

Instead, expect to see and be new things.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

A Brautigan omnibus, reissued in paperback in celebration of its twentieth anniversary, this one-volume edition includes three contemporary classics that embody the spirit of the 1960s.

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