An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey [Paperback]

Richard Brautigan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 10, 2001

Richard Brautigan's last novel, published in the U.S. for the first time

Richard Brautigan was an original--brilliant and wickedly funny, his books resonated with the sixties, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Taken in its entirety, his body of work reveals an artistry that outreaches the literary fads that so quickly swept him up.

Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book-length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist's travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman, and a close friend's death from cancer.

After Richard Brautigan committed suicide, his only child, Ianthe Brautigan, found among his possessions the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman. It had been completed over a year earlier, but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding it was too painful to face her father's presence page after page, she put the manuscript aside.

Years later, having completed a memoir about her father's life and death, Ianthe Brautigan reread An Unfortunate Woman, and finally, clear-eyed, she saw that it was her father's work at its best and had to be published.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Eerily foreshadowing the 1984 suicide of its author, counterculture legend Brautigan, this previously unpublished book is a semiautobiographical description of one man's experience of the classic symptoms of depression. The narrator, clearly the talented, alcoholic, sexually questing Brautigan, explains his rambling account as "a calendar of one man's journey during a few months of his life." The episodic entries, dating from January to June of 1982, at first seem whimsically random, as the narrator recounts a peripatetic six months wandering among Montana, Berkeley, Hawaii, San Francisco, Buffalo, the Midwest, Alaska, Canada and points in between, but soon it's obvious that a preoccupation with death is the dominant theme. The narrator stays at various times in the house of "an unfortunate woman" who hanged herself, and the event darkens his consciousness even when he is not physically there. Meanwhile, another friend is dying of cancer, and this, too, contributes to his morbid state of mind. Financial troubles, estrangement from his daughter, insomnia, a deepening dependence on drink and the confession that he feels "very terribly alone" add up to a picture of a man whose melancholy will reach the breaking point. Even so, Brautigan maintains his ironic humor and his ability to write clear, often crystalline prose, though at time his mannerismsArepetition of a pedestrian thought, a habit of attaching cosmic significance to a mundane event, such as an Alaskan crow eating a hot dog bunAbecome irritating. Yet the reader cannot help being moved by this candid cri de coeur of a soul in anguish, and to his fans, these last words will be a book to treasure. (June) a memoir written by Brautigan's daughter, reviewed in this issue's Nonfiction Forecasts.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 132 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (July 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312277105
• ISBN-13: 978-0312277109
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #722,635 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rewards await the faithful Brautigan fan, April 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey (Hardcover)

Whereas the first-time Brautigan reader would not want to start here, fans of the man will find both uplifting and sad insight running through this quirky memoir in which death hovers over Brautigan's every thought like an oddly comforting cloud. He makes little, if any, connection between death and himself (he would commit suicide shortly after writing the book), instead approaching it in his typical playful and quirky manner. The title character, unnamed, is referred to throughout as a suicide victim whose circumstances Brautigan would prefer to not know. For its bulk, the structure of the book remains uncertain to both the reader and the author -- until it becomes apparent that it's a journal of a few weeks in the man as much as his work. His rampant use of metaphors is toned down considerably, as are the open-ended quasi-Zen statements. Their absence leaves room for Brautigan to show his abilities as a compelling story-teller rather than magician. The story of his uneventful travels, however, and his insistence on letting events (and availability of notebook space) shape the story -- rather than his imagination -- is a far cry from the wizardry of "Willard" or "Watermelon Sugar." At the same time, it provides an insight to the author -- mention of his daughter is heartbreaking -- that none of his works has included, and for that his loyal readers will enjoy this work immensely. END

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Coda to a Career, December 19, 2000

By 

Lee Armstrong (Winterville, NC United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey (Hardcover)

As the first book of Brautigan's to read, An Unfortunate Woman may not be the best place to start. But as a coda for his marvelous career, this is a book not to be missed. The importance of the book is not so much its subject or its undetectable plot, as for the facination of its musings and the unmistakable Brautigan style. I always feel refreshed by the simple sentence structures and child-like observations when I read his work. This book is no different. I found an elegant bittersweet feel to the way life slips away, how our best intentions are diverted by life, and how we seem to accomplish a portion of that which we intend. The sadness and lonliness that permeates the work is in counterpoint to the sense of wonder we get from Brautigan's style. Sadly, the posthumous publication of the work points to the real ending of the book. Richard Brautigan was unique as an author, one who will probably be underestimated in stature for a time, but one who touches our hearts as few others can and makes us set the world on its ear to see what's inside. If you've read other of Brautigan's work, don't fail to see how the story ends...

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Ghost Of Trout Fishing In America, June 9, 2000

By 

MARTIN AVERY (Muskoka, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey (Hardcover)

Richard Brautigan's dark side is everywhere evident in this short novel about how marginalized he felt when a woman hanged herself while another was dying of cancer. This is not Brautigan's best, no matter what some of the other reviewers claim. It is best read as a companion piece to his daughter's memoir. Ianthe Brautigan wonders why her father committed suicide and explores a number of reasons. They are all here in the last book by Brautigan, written a couple of years before he shot himself. It's sad. America should take better care of its writers. There are hints, in this novel, of Brautigan at his best, and it makes you wish -- more than ever -- he was still in the land of the living, cranking out more Brautigan originals.