Selected Book
An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey
- Paperback
- Edition: 1st
- Author: Richard Brautigan
- Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
- Release Date: July 2001
- ISBN-10: 0312277105
- ISBN-13: 9780312277109
- List Price: $12.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryIn this posthumously released novel, Richard Brautigan's voice--quipping, punning, strewn with non sequiturs--comes like a rattling of chains. Brautigan took his own life in 1984; An Unfortunate Woman was written in the years immediately preceding, and the writer's imminent death haunts the book. It bears the subtitle A Journey, and Brautigan means this quite literally. We follow the first-person narrator in his peregrinations from Montana to San Francisco to New York to Alaska to Honolulu and back to San Francisco, with a detour across the bay to Berkeley--and that's leaving out Canada altogether. Pulling him like a wispy thread throughout is the hanging death of a San Francisco housemate who had cancer. We never learn her story, just that his book's "main theme is an unfortunate woman." She's a constant glancing reference. Brautigan uses a journal format, with digressions galore, to explore the contingency of his own existence. He tells of loves past, homes past, the kitchens of friends and the beds of strangers. But like the old free-lovin' hippie he is, he never commits to any single story. Of one fellow he meets in Ketchikan: "He is one of those people who in a normal book, unfortunately not this one, would be developed into a memorable character." The author is forever warning you of a digression ahead or a story he'll get back to later. His references to the book in progress read, in this rueful context, not so much as self-indulgent cuteness, but as a kind of sad knowledge of the unkempt ways of his own mind. An Unfortunate Woman will not bring Brautigan many new fans, but devoted readers will find the dark, self-revealing side of a man who felt middle age like a blow to the head. --Claire Dederer |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Brautigan's Last
Rating:
I only recently became familiar with Richard Brautigan's work. His prose style is idiosyncratic, perhaps owing to his background as a poet and the intersection of his career with 1960s and 70s California. His novels (as they are called) are written as a series of one to three-page chapters comprised of episodes, thoughts, or memories seemingly based on Brautigan's own life. The line between autobiography and fiction is sometimes hazy, and the short chapters often (or even usually) seem unrelated. Labeling the books fiction gave Brautigan tremendous freedom. The reader can usually discern fact from fiction, but you never know for certain. The books are hard to describe: part humor, part "hippie," part pathos -- all mixed together.
Reading Brautigan's novels now, three or four decades after they were written, creates a strong sense of nostalgia which, to me, adds a great deal to their appeal. There is often a double dose of nostalgia as the author sometimes refers back to his own childhood.
If you are new to Brautigan, I would not recommend "An Unfortunate Woman" as your first book. That is not to say it is a bad book, but it has a different feel than the others. (If you don't already know, Brautigan completed this book only a couple of years before his suicide in 1984; it was published posthumously many years later.) The concept for this book is quite interesting. He purchased a notebook and began writing in it, never flipping back to read what he'd written earlier. When he filled up the notebook, he called it a finished work. He called this book a "calendar map"; it describes the passage of time and the changing of locations during that particular period of his life. There are breaks of weeks and months where he ceased writing, requiring him to fill in the gaps when he resumed. As with all of his novels, some chapters are more effective than others, but you will encounter more than a few nuggets worth later reflection.
Longtime fans will certainly want to read this book, but I recommend newcomers start with "Trout Fishing in America" or "Revenge of the Lawn," or my personal favorite "So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away."
I am fortunate to have read this book.
Rating:
I have no clue how I found out about this book but am very glad I did since it has become one of my favorites.
At 110 pages, it is a very fast read.
This is not a story with a plot. It is not about a woman, unfortunate or otherwise, as the title might lead you to believe. It is very non-linear like the natural ebb and flow of a 5 hour conversation you might have at stupid o'clock in the morning when you interrupt your own thoughts with tangents. It is random but not disjointed. He writes about things others might not find worth mentioning but does so in such detail that it becomes interesting and even injects a bit of humor in the process.
Although billed as fiction, it is apparent that his journaled words are truly an autobiographical slice.
Glad I read it
Rating:
It took me several months to read this book. Not that its long and not that its difficult to read either. I just had to take it in slowly. I have made it a mission of mine to read every Brautigan book.
I started with Watermellon Sugar and a friend gave me Tokyo Montana Express after picking it up at a garage sale.Read several others too.
My suggestion read the book in small doses.Just like it was written.
And to me, well I am dissappointed that Brautigan commited suicide, but it wasnt right after he finished this book.
It was 2 years later. And kind of ironic, that as in the book where he stayed in the house where the women commits suicide, Well he too stayed in his own house after he committed suicide.
( Ill have to check , but I do believe there was one more book written after this one)
If you like Brautigan, you'll like this.
I especially like the part where he visits the cemetary,the cuckoo clock, and the man eating a donut.
An unfortunate end...
Rating:
This book was handed to me in a local bookstore by a friend who thought I might enjoy it. I took it home and read it on a fine sunny September afternoon, lying in the hammock part of the time, and sitting on the steps of my back porch for the rest. I had my introduction to Brautigan earlier this year with The Abortion and In Watermelon Sugar. Both were entertaining and also inspired in their honesty. I have placed Brautigan in my canon of Saints of the Ordinary, as he is pretty much putting pen to paper to tell the strange and beautiful story of his life and loves. One reviewer of An Unfortunate Woman praises Brautigan's "deft evocation of the thoroughly marginal places" of our lives. Thus, we are permitted access to ordinary scenes in the grocery store, as he stands in front of shelves of soup and fantasizes about a warm cup of soup on a cold and rainy day. Or we sit over numerous cups of coffee with Brautigan and the women he loves. He has a very matter of fact style that leaves me feeling that nothing is so mundane or meaningless that it can not be ennobled and rightfully celebrated with the rituals and observations of writing.
As I sat, drinking tea, after finishing Brautigan's book, a friend walked by the cafe and asked what I had been reading. I showed him the book. He said that he always enjoyed reading Brautigan, but that he could never look at his writing the same, with its carefree, beat attitude, after he heard that Brautigan had killed himself. This discredited the writing in his eyes.
That knowledge, that Brautigan had killed himself soon after this book was written as a sort of travel journal in 1982, definitely casts the book in a different light. Throughout, the narrator struggles to describe the death of a woman who hung herself, but finds himself persistently distracted by the events of his life, so that he never really can come to terms with this strange death. He stays in the suicide's house for a number of days, but still avoids the subject of her death. In the face of the book's title, An Unfortunate Woman, Brautigan's stuggle to address this central subject seems to indicate a larger entanglement with the subject of death, and contrary to his earlier works, this seems to have a patent loneliness to it, as he finally retreats into a cabin in the woods outside of Bozeman for a week of solitude, with provisions and only his own thoughts to keep him company.
It certainly helped to have a grounding in Brautigan's other work before reading this. But his lovable spirit is still alive in this posthumously published work.
A Fortunate Find- for Brautigan fans only
Rating:
Since so many other reviewers seem to find it clever or necessary to use alcohol-related references, I'll start by saying this book is not a fine wine, or a smooth bourbon. It's a cold beer, a plain cold beer in your hands that's as good and as average as many other cold beers you've consumed in the past. You sip and think, yeah, just a beer. You turn the page, sip again and- "God this beer is the best!"
If you have read and enjoyed R.B.'s books, you'll enjoy this one, if only for the gems contained within the whole of a somewhat tedious read. This, like 'Sombrero Fallout', is not the book to introduce someone to Brautigan. In fact, before reading this loose collection of ramblings, I would strongly suggest reading the essential 'You Can't Catch Death' which stands alone and will also provide a frame of reference, although IT is far more meaningful if you've read 'Trout Fishing' etc. first.
For some of us, Brautigan is like a mild addiction, in that you must have every bit of what he's written, even knowing much of it may not be worth reading. We identify with his thoughts, and so want to know all of the thoughts, despite many of them being as mundane as our own. In that regard, parts of the book become annoying- bad enough to waste time thinking simple thoughts, more so to waste time reading another's. That said, one can easily skim through the dross and then slow to absorb the simple yet elegant musings which could only come from someone like R.B. or Billy Collins.
Buy it used for cheap, add it to your collection, there's worse things than a plain cold beer.
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