Book: An Unfortunate Woman

For years I have avoided reading Richard Brautigan's last novel. I knew it was written shortly before he killed himself, and presaged his death with long passages of depression and resignation.

But I've read everything else of his, including his early student writing that wasn't published until after he died. When I ran across an inexpensive copy at Amazon (a remainder stamped "discarded by Bernardsville Public Library" of Bernardsville NJ, complete with library card holder and Dewey spine label) I decided to complete the collection.

It was an interesting journey, as indeed the subtitle promises. At one level it is the story -- possibly real, probably novelized -- of a friend of his who is dying of cancer and a friend of this friend who committed suicide by hanging herself in her house in Berkeley. Richard goes to stay in this home, and muses on the woman's life, who he didn't know except by reputation through his cancerous friend.

But on another level, it's not that story at all.

Told in an endless series of diversions -- as is his style, but here carried to extreme -- this is Richard's life in 1982, or a novel describing his life in 1982, hard to know if it's real life or made up. But the events and musings and timeline sound accurate, from what I know of his life.

The book was written in 1982, but not published until 1994, long after his suicide, and then only in a French translation. It took until 2000 for his daughter -- who is mentioned in one chapter where he describes a Father's Day phone call from her and his regrets at not being closer to her, emotionally and physically -- his daughter to arrange an English printing, to coincide with her own memoire of her father, "You Can't Catch Death" which is itself a lovely piece of work. In short, this book was left abandoned in a house in the woods, undiscovered with a bullet through it's head, like Richard himself.

As a book it breaks down the fourth wall, talking to the reader and acknowledging itself as a book. In fact, Richard mentions several times that it's being written in a 160-page spiral bound notebook and it won't be done until the notebook is full. Whether this is really what happened is left for the reader to ponder.

Just as pondering Richard's life and death and last work lead to an afternoon's diversion in the rain of an otherwise uneventful day.

I have a couple of Brautigan's novels: Dreaming of Babylon: A Detective Novel 1942 and The Tokyo-Montana Express. I was a very different person when I bought them many years ago; possibly that's why I have never taken them off the shelf and opened them. Maybe it's time I did so. Thanks for the reminder.

TME is pretty good but Babylon is best left on the shelf. As is Willard and his Bowling Trophies.

Brautigan could be twee.

Thanks. I'll start with TME when I have finished the overly-wordy novel I'm reading now. I have to say, though, that twee doesn't hold my interest well.