So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away [Paperback]

Richard Brautigan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1984 | ISBN-10: 0385292872 | ISBN-13: 978-0385292870 | Edition: First Thus

So the Wind Won't Blow it all Away is a beautifully written, brooding gem of a novel - set in the Pacific Northwest region of Oregon where Brautigan spent most of his childhood.Through the eyes, ears and voice of Brautigan's youthful protagonist the reader is gently led into a small-town tale where the narrator accidentally shoots dead his best friend with a gun. The novel deals with the repercussions of this tragedy and its recurring theme of 'What if...' fuels anguish, regret and self-blame as well as some darkly comic passages of bitter-sweet romance and despair.Taken with the recently discovered An Unfortunate Woman these two late Brautigan novels are a fitting epitaph to a complex, contradictory and often misunderstood genius.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Doubleday; First Thus edition (February 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385292872
• ISBN-13: 978-0385292870
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 7.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,706,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most achingly beautiful novel Brautigan ever wrote., August 25, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (Hardcover)

Richard Brautigan's story of a young boy whose life is forever changed by the decision not to eat a hamburger is simultaneously sweetly amusing and heartbreakingly tragic. That this novel is out of print, especially in light of his death in 1984, is equally tragic. If you read no other Brautigan work, read this novel.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elegy to a lost America, August 28, 2007

By 

Michael Hoffman "Revisionist historian" (Idaho, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (Paperback)

From a survey of reviews of Brautigan's work here at Amazon, it seems he is lost to Gen X or whatever they're calling "youth" these days. They don't "get" him, but maybe they should avoid "Trout Fishing in America" which is supposed to be his all-time classic. The three that truly deserve a place in the canon are "The Hawkline Monster," "Willard and his Bowling Trophies" (both written while Brautigan was in the ascendant) and this one, "So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away," his semi-autobiographical elegy to a lost America; not sentimental or maudlin, but mournful and challenging. I have never forgotten the scene of Brautigan and another soaking-wet ragamuffin shooting apples with .22s in an abandoned orchard, while the rain poured. "We were Pacific Northwest kids!" he shouts with defiant joy. The terminal scene, with the couple who take their couch with them fishing, teaches that living one's dreams necessarily entails exhibiting one's "eccenctricity" (actually authenticity). Brautigan did away with himself in his 40s due to a wife who fled, along with a career on the skids and alcohol (allegedly), but readers of this book know there was more to it than those merely contributing factors. Brautigan didn't want to pick up the pieces of his self after it had been homogenized and processed as we are now, in an age where we spend so much time staring at TV sets and video screens, and being stared at in return by "security" cameras. Suicide is a terrible wrong, but this little volume shows that Brautigan did not wish to endure the torments of a 21st century-style modernity, for fear of how he would be diminished by it. I liked him for many disparate and "crazy" reasons, including the fact that he was a true Oregonian westerner, Montana transplant and disparager of everything for which Woody Allen stands. Bruatigan and Keoruac could only have been Americans...The wind has blown a lot of it away, but maybe not all.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brautigan's final novel is a sweet gust of nostalgia, June 20, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (Paperback)

It is terrible to think of what Brautigan must have gone through in the final years of his life that lead him to suicide. But one of those things was definitely reflection. Here, he leaves behind his tradional creative bursts and settles in for a lush, almost southern-gothic-like novel. But it is the nostalgia tainted by a cruel and adult world. As a reader, you feel blown through the small town landscapes Brautigan gusts at you. But when you realize where he was headed, the symbolism of the central (child) character with the gun is bone-chilling. Had Brautigan recovered, and continued in this style, he would have had a whole new lease on writing. As it is, we have one example; and that one example is astonishing