Customer Reviews

Richard Brautigan : A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and the Hawkline Monster (Three Books in the Manner of Their Original ed)

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"A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster" is a collection of three separate novels by Richard Brautigan. The three books are bound together in one volume with separate pagination. Together they demonstrate Brautigan to be a witty, wacky, and altogether remarkable writer.

I actually found "Confederate General" to be the weakest of the three. This novel follows the misadventures of the impoverished narrator and his friend in California. It's a story, told with absurdist and satiric flourishes, of people on the fringes of society. I especially liked the narrator's unique approach to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes.

"Dreaming of Babylon" is a hilarious and delightful spoof of a hard-boiled detective novel. Brautigan's anti-hero, C. Card, is a poor, not-too-intelligent private eye working in San Francisco in 1942. Early in the book we learn that he is too poor to even afford bullets for his gun, and is hounded for rent by his landlady. His escape from this harried existence is an anachronistic fantasy life in ancient Babylon. This is a really fun book that effectively satirizes various popular entertainment genres. And despite being a lowlife, Card is a curiously appealing narrator.

The third novel, "The Hawkline Monster," is a remarkable blend of horror, science fiction, western, and absurdist comedy. Taking place mainly in Oregon in 1902, the book follows the adventure of two assassins who are hired to kill the monster of the title. The book is full of quirky characters and bizarre situations. Brautigan creates genuine suspense, and his prose at its best is vivid and crisply poetic.

Brautigan's work in this trio of novels reminds me at times of the writings of Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut. But despite certain similarities to these two, I believe that Brautigan is a unique voice, and his work is a wonderful addition to the tradition of American fiction.

When I first read Hawkline Monster, the first Brautigan novel I came across, I was taken aback. I'd never read anything as interesting as this tale of two professional killers hired to kill a supposed monster. I became a fan. Confederate General, however, became my favorite. Brautigan takes his readers into another world--goes beyond simple experience in chapters like Lee Melon performing his rights of tobacco at Big Sur. With Dreaming of Babylon--a unique mystery--this is one of the best Brautigan collections around.

I was reading stuff on the Internet about Brautigan and someone said that if you like his stuff, you'll have to read everything you can get your hands on. That's me. There's three collections of his that have been released, each one with three books in it. Of those three collections, this is my least favorite.

CONFEDERATE GENERAL, is about two couples, including the narrator and Lee Mellon, a Confederate General who lost his shoes. The book is mostly about them drinking and getting high in a strange house in the middle of nowhere. The surreal house has glass walls and a pond where they keep frogs and alligators. They also have problems with people chopping down their trees. A strange man Lee Mellon once knew visits them. He is crazy. The story has six endings.

DREAMING OF BABYLON is the strangest P.I. novel you will ever read. Likewise, THE HAWKLINE MONSTER is a western, only in the loosest sense of the term. Even if you like Brautigan's writing (which apparently is pretty polarizing), it's hard to guess what anyone will make of these stories. I thought they were pretty cool, and unlike anything else ever, which is a good thing.

It's been a couple of decades since I last read Brautigan. I was surprised to find this collection at all, thinking his stuff way out of print and out of Literary Fashion along with all that other sixties hippie-dippie stuff. Couln't be any good. Wrong! The three stories are a delight, fast paced, and imaginative. Confederate General reads like the best of the beat writers, evoking the relationship between Kerouak and Cassidy. The other two stories are nearly as good, with strong but simple characterizations. I can remember what it was to live like the folks in these books, in a time filled with challenge and promise and new freedoms. Before grey hair, IRA's, and desk top computers. Read these. Let the wind blow through your hair a little! March 29, 1998.

There is a comic genius at work in each of these three novels. The theme of Confederate General at Big Sur must be that we all have been acting like we believe we are descendents of some confederate general, even if a private who was always off stealing chickens or some Yankee's boots would be a more accurate description of our past. Dreaming of Babylon might be the ultimate description, in a detective story, of the results of American intelligence when applied to the question of left and right (whichever one happened to be pointing straight up in the air went click instead of boom). The Hawkline Monster has a college professor working in ice caves until he was turned into an elephant foot umbrella stand. This must be about cold war intellectuals, and it might even be safe to say that, now that the cold war is over, but the intellectuals are still here. Trust me, I am not giving too much away about these books. There are so many jokes packed into these novels that offering a rubric for understanding how anyone could write this stuff and still feed chickens in Montana with his household garbage, the corn cobs of which seemed like skylab to him when one landed on a chicken's head, should not be read as an attempt to impose any limitation that would keep people who know how this stuff goes from thinking that my opinions about this stuff could easily seem as clueless as the thoughts of the detective in Dreaming of Babylon after a major league baseball pitcher practiced throwing fast balls at his head.

The work that made me a real fan was "Dreaming of Babylon", the main character is Nana-Dirat, a wonderfool woman from Babylon. She exists only in the mind of a bad detective but she's more real than any other woman I have ever meat. I even dedicated one of my short novels to this beauty.

Then reading all his novels, you discover that he's the master of the short novel. The greatest master ever. This man can say in 100 pages what Tolstoy said in 1,000. This is probably the greatest American novelist ever, because in many ways he invented a complete new path in literature many writers will discover in years to come and be influenced by it.

Brautigan is a famous writer now, but his his place in American prose will probably grow.

(And yes the wonderfool should be wonderful, but that's the point:-)

My brother-in-law was a janitor who cleaned a small, hole-in-the wall book store in Redwood City, California. The store's no longer there, but the memory will live forever.

I was in the store one day, off-hours, while my brother-in-law did his thing. I browsed the shelves and spotted a book: "The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western." For some reason...unknown, un-remembered, and in the final analysis, totally irrelevant...the title struck my fancy. I picked it up, thumbed through it.

The next day, during business hours, I returned to the store and purchased it. Here's why:

Page 10 (of my edition)...

"The voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii had been the most terrifying experience Greer and Cameron had ever gone through, even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn't die and Greer finally had to say to the deputy sheriff. "Please die because we don't want to shoot you again." And the deputy sheriff had said "OK, I'll die, but don't shoot me again."

"We won't shoot you again," Cameron had said.

"OK, I'm dead," and he was.

I read that passage, I bought "Hawkline Monster," and then I bought the other 4 books of poetry, 1 book of short stories, and 9 books of fiction that were in print, and still available, in Richard's lifetime.

The passage I quoted will either resonate with you or it won't. For me, it was the heart of Brautigan, and it motivated me to own his collected works.

His life was achingly tragic, as was his death. You can find many overtones of that in his writing. He was, and is, an essential artist. He will continue to be missed.

"The Hawkline Monster" is my favorite Brautigan book. I invite you to purchase it and experience the joy within its pages.

An episode of Rudy Maxa's "Smart Travels" devoted to San Francisco mentions that Angel Island was a fort during the Civil War. Why would San Francisco need a fort during in the Civil War? Rudy asks. Because, the park ranger tells him, the Confederate Army could have sent a ship into the Bay and up to Sacramento to seize the gold stored there.

Brautigan!

Maybe the premise of Brautigan's Big Sur novel wasn't as drug (or Red Mountain wine) induced as one might suspect. It's a sort of Great Gatsby for the hippie culture. The story's hero is Lee Mellon, descended from a Civil War general (or so Mellon claims). His ties to prestigious heritage are about as tenuous as Gatsby's.

The opening chapter details the exploits of the 8th Big Sur Volunteer Heavy Root Eaters at the Civil War skirmish known as the Battle of the Wilderness. Brautigan didn't dream this up! There really was a Battle of the Wilderness.

Brautigan obviously spent a lot of time in Big Sur hanging out with early hippies and counterculture types. As you read the story, it's easy to picture "those lonely stark mountains and clifflike beaches." Who knows, maybe Kerouac was there working on his Big Sur book (also worth reading). He mentions Henry Miller driving a Cadillac. There are sly references to William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Patchen, and Steinbeck (Big Sur is very much Steinbeck country).

Although the military theme is sustained through much of the book (A Daring Calvary Attack on PG&E, for example) the fiercest battles are waged against frogs.

When you buy this volume, you get Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster thrown in as a bonus. These are novels for people who like to read for fun and enjoy stories that are simply silly. They are along the same lines as Brautigan's short story collection Revenge of the Lawn. If you liked Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House, chances are you will like these stories too.

These three novels, though very different in terms of both style and genre, satisfy most when read as a single tome. Brautigan's language is simple and direct, peppered with vivid images created by a unique turn of phrase or simple a contrast.

At times the language can be very elementary, even laughable (maybe a product of Brautigan's drug preferences and generation), but if the reader rides through the simple there awaits a warm reward.

Brautigan was a poet and author who made his mark with the Beat Poets of the San Francisco North Beach (Barbary Coast), such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg. His style ranges from gritty and earthy to dreamlike and surreal. His sense of humour is incomparible. I strongly recommend this volume to start off with (even though "Dreaming Of Babylon" is not one of my favourites), since "A Confederate General In Big Sur" and "The Hawkline Monster" are excellent novels to begin your Brautigan jones with. :o) I would also highly recommend "In Watermelon Sugar," "Willard And His Bowling Trophies," and the collection "Trout Fishing In America." Enjoy! (You may thank me later.)