The Hawkline Monster by Richard Brautigan
My rating: 4/5 cats
i am willing to give second chances.
even if i am angered or bewildered or heartbroken, i am always willing to take stock of circumstances, offer up the opportunity for redemption, and allow someone back into the warmth of my heart. we should all be as emotionally charitable as me. just don’t fuck up a second time.
i read this brautigan novel with trepidation. that motherfucker burned me before.
are you distressed that i have already used variants of the word “fuck” twice in the first fifty or so words?
then you will probably not like richard brautigan. read this instead. (i love the angry southerner’s review of this – teehee)
maureen assured me that this was a “good” brautigan book. unlike the brautigan to which i had been exposed in the past. if i had the correct facial muscles, i would have raised a single eyebrow at her, but i cannot do anything cool, so instead i grunted. she was in canada, and so could not hear me.
but i’m game, so i made greg get this for me from the library. (princess neither does her own taxes nor leaves her own library-rental paper trail)
and it was not at all bad.
pretty enjoyable, in fact.
i was doubly concerned before reading, because remember when robert coover wrote his version of a western; Ghost Town? i did not love that book at all. usually, his schtick works for me, but i remember being annoyed by that one. this one also does a sort of western mash-up, decorating the traditional western theme with some furnishings from the gothic genre. big isolated house, subterranean caverns, unnameable force of eeeevil. (well, pretty nameable, actually. it is called the hawkline monster, as a matter of fact) but it’s got some ionesco lunacy and a lot of fuckin’. also teenaged prostitutes and a giant butler and an umbrella stand made out of an elephant’s foot. also, some fuckin’.
it is a little icky, of course, as artifacts from the seventies will be in the attitudes towards the interchangeability of women as sex partners and icksome group sex.
but it is also a fast and perplexing read, where people suffer memory loss and blend into other people, sort of, and things are all a bit eerie. but funny. i don’t know how to explain it. it is like watching a bunch of clowns in cowboy hats and eyeliner having an orgy. who can find the words?
i am going to magnanimously let greg read this book before he returns it to the library.
maybe he will find a better way of describing it.
but for me, i will say – welcome to my heart, brautigan – watch your step…
