Customer Reviews

Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (A Touchstone Book)

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There's this guy. You don't know what he's called (but, at a push, it might be Richard). He's a writer. No. Scratch that. He describes himself as "an American humourist". You get the impression he is known and respected and all of the things any writer wants. He has just split with his long-term Japanese girlfriend Yukiko. Or rather, she has just split with him, after two years. The parting is not amicable. She is fed up with him. She has decided no more writers. She will never date a writer again. Writers are too high-maintenance. It may be, in time, she will look back on the times they have shared with something like fondness, but not yet, not now, not at the moment. At the moment, she wants to put those two wasted years behind her. The American humourist is understandably devastated. He is awake while Yukiko is sleeping and dreaming with her cat across town. He tries to write.

He starts a story about a sombrero that falls from the sky. We don't know why. The sombrero just fell from the sky. We don't know how it got there. Just that it fell from the sky. The mayor, the mayor's aspiring cousin and an unemployed man converge on the hat.

At which point the American humourist tires of the sombrero, takes the paper from his typewriter and tears it into a million pieces before depositing said pieces in his wastepaper basket. The American humourist spends the rest of the novel trying to fill the gap left by Yukiko. Filling the gap involves thinking about food, searching for lost Japanese hair and thinking about what might have been.

While that is going on, the sombrero story (the story torn up and abandoned by the American humourist) develops a life of its own down there in the wastepaper basket. The mayor, the mayor's cousin and the unemployed man fall out about the sombrero. There is a riot. The national guard is called out. There are running gun battles, civilian casualties, chaos, the threat of civil war. The president makes a speech that comes to rival the Gettysburg Address. All that from a sombrero that falls from the sky.

None of which is really the point.

Gustave Flaubert said that language was like a cracked kettle on which we play tunes for bears to dance to hoping to move the stars to pity. I always think of this whenever I read anything by Brautigan. It's true of "Sombrero Fallout". It's true of "Revenge of the Lawn". It's true of "A Confederate General from Big Sur". It's true of pretty much anything. I can picture him there, in a forest clearing with the remains of last night's fire burned out in front of him, the old cracked copper kettle upturned between his legs and all those bears dancing - bears dancing as far as the eye can see - and maybe rain, maybe a light rain because those stars are pitying, those stars are moved, those stars haven't seen the like and won't see the like again.

I'm loathe to try and pick a single example of exactly what I mean but I've just been playing Virgilian lots (I think that's what it's called, when you open a book at random anywhere and see what you can see) and I've found this. Here's Brautigan. He's talking about Yukiko's "beautiful laugh (which) was like rain water pouring over daffodils made from silver". Could be that does nothing to you. Tell you something though. It makes me shiver. A lot of writers, reading comes to resemble panhandling for gold. You're there, holding the book in the water, trying to decide if that was gold or grit, unable to tell for sure. With Brautigan, it's all there. Each book is a bag of gold. You don't gotta do anything, just sit back and take it all in. Each book is a bag of gold and each grain shines.

This has always been my favorite Brautigan book and it really is a shame that it's out of print. I don't normally re-read books, but I have now read this one three times. I read it once in college when a girlfriend lent it to me. When we broke up, I hoped she'd forget that I had it but she didn't(!) The next time I read it was when I borrowed it from the local library. After re-reading it I thought about keeping it and paying the library for it, but that definitely didn't seem very 'Brautiganish' so I returned it and went on a quest to find my own copy. A recent trip to San Francisco uncovered a new version that was published in London. I quickly snapped it up. I just re-read it a third time and again, I am floored at how Brautigan can be WILDLY funny on one page and TRAGICALLY blue on another. If you're luckly enough to get your hands on this excellent book, I recommend that you read it all in one sitting for maximum impact.

Walking into a small local library...I went to the B's in search of a Brautigan book I might not have read. Small in stature and one of his easier reads, I found "Sombrero Fallout". I devoured it that day, reread it the next...and found it very, very hard to return. Any fan of Brautigan, and anyone who is new to his works, should read this book.

easily the most poignant story I have read by Brautigan, and arguably of any book I have ever read. The duality of the situations portrayed in the book (one, a mysterious sombrero falls out of the blue sky in a small town; two, the desperate loss of the love of a Japanese woman with beautiful hair) swings from the painfully bitter to the ridiculously humorous, sometimes even within the same paragraph! Brautigan's metaphors are fresh and insightful, and the depth created despite simplicity is virtually unmatched (Vigorous writing is concise)! It is truly a shame that this book is no longer in print.

"Sobrero Fallout" stands as Brautigan's most overlooked work. Coming as it did after a few throwaways, ("The Hawkline Monster" and "Willard and His Bowling Trophies") people had Brautigan written off and this attracted no new readers to its insanity. Which is a shame. The story itself is split into two sides. One revolves around a Sombrero which falls from the sky and the ensuing argument over who, EXACTLY, is going to pick it up. This results in the National Guard being called out and all sorts of nonsense. This is fun stuff, but it's the other story, of Brautigan's pining over his lost relationship with a Japanese woman, that stands as one of his very best. Do not pass this book up, if you can find it! A truly unique vision

i wake up, grab richard, and sit on my stoop until there is no more richard to be had.

"If he taught his worries to sing, they would have made the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sound like a potato."

Richard Brautigan was first and foremost a poet. Coming from the "beat generation" in and around San Francisco, Brautigan was in the right place at the right time to release his deceptively simple poetry. His observations and his clever wordplay made books like The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster...Selected Poems 1957-1968 mandatory reading by the counter culture. Like most of his readers, I started with Trout Fishing in America: A novel, but it was his odd, under-appreciated books that appealed to me the most, like Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942.

To me, Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel is something of a companion piece to Babylon. In both books, it is not about the story, it is about the style. In fact, on page two, the "story" is yanked from Brautigan's typewriter and thrown into the trash. Even Brautigan is not interested in the sombrero that falls out of the sky. The heart of this book is a poet's attempt to put into words something that is wordless; a loss. Specifically, the loss of a beautiful Japanese woman who sleeps across town, while the author tries to explain why she left and how he feels.

It's quirky, off-center and pure genius.

I had never read this particular Brautigan title, but I owned a copy, and when a young woman on her honeymoon came into the independent used bookstore where I work desperately seeking to replace her lent-out-never-returned copy, I told her to come back the next day. Meanwhile I read the book (in two sittings, which worked out fine).

Three stories alternate chapters:
· A man with no sense of humor, who is also an American writer of popular humorous novels, spends two hours one night grieving the end of his latest relationship;
· the young Japanese woman who left him now sleeps;
· and an anarchistic, cancerous story continues on its own from a page written by the writer, torn into pieces, and thrown into the wastebasket.

The third story, of the eponymous sombrero, is of a town that goes berserk after the icy white sombrero falls from a clear sky. It is purposely a bad story, as it has lost the attention of the writer, just as the writer has lost the attention of the Japanese woman and is now similarly falling apart. The violent, over-the-top wastebasket story became tedious to me, but the other two stories were lovely and illuminating, in a self-obsessed way. Perhaps this novel's best time for my life has passed, so happy honeymoon, Rachel!

richard where were you my friend to long life witha new stuff write from you!