Product Description

Through the eyes, ears and voice of Brautigan's youthful protagonist, we are lead gently 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 the theme of "What if...".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #566954 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 115 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Regretful and suffused with sadness, So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away, Richard Brautigan's final novel prior to his death by suicide in 1984, strikes a more sombre note that the earlier work that made him a famous figure in the American beat scene of the 1960s. Tracing the events leading ineluctably to the teenage narrator's accidental shooting of his best friend in post-World War Two Pacific West America, Brautigan employs the same elliptical word play and exhibits the same joy in the possibilities of language as in earlier works such as Trout Fishing in America. However, the narrative is shot through with a sense of sadness for a lost way of life, the departure of childhood and the death of the American gothic, something Brautigan blames on television for the way it "crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their fantasies with dignity".

So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away is hugely underrated in the Brautigan canon. Although the story is set in the 1940s, the elegiac tone places the novel firmly within the context of the 1980s when it was first published. Brautigan took his own life two years after the novel's publication and the narrator's sense of alienation from modern America seems to mirror the way that his free-wheeling, free-associating sensibility had become hopelessly out of touch with the pervading culture of the time. But that is precisely why this small, beautifully sad novel is so important. Whereas in earlier works, Brautigan's characters viewed the world with child-like fascination and amusement, in So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away he reverses the process by examining a child's world through an adult's sad and diminishing gaze. It's a summation of all that Brautigan had previously achieved but in the harsher, colder climate of the late 20th century. --Jane Morris

Customer Reviews

stunning
I have had an interest in the Beat scene ever since i read On The Road and since then have tried to read as much as possible by authors involved in the scene.
This was the first Brautigan book that i have read and felt that it was a good place to start as it seems to have something for everyone.
The writing was like nothing i had read before, extremely funny, moving, imaginative and descriptive it conveyed a ton of emotions. Brautigan moves sometimes between past present and future and can be hard to follow but it is brilliant once you get into it. Read it.

The best Brautigan book I've read so far...
I'm in the middle of reading everything I can get my hands on by Brautigan. Just because of the sheer originality of every sentence he wrote and the completely skewed take he offers of the world, triggering off every time some other thought that never before occured to me. And this is by far the best I've read up until now. An absolute masterpiece in minature. The months and years, remarkable and unremarkable, rippling backwards and forwards from this one significant moment of a boy's life. Astounding stuff. The tangents that Brautigan appears to stumble upon and then follow all the way to their logical end remind you that it's precisely these little episodes, these seemingly unrelated instances, that constitute the fabric of our lives.

Oh yeah, it's funny as well.

Brautigan's best?
This is definitely one of Brautigan's best novels. The tone, however, is more Raymond Carver than the Richard Brautigan of Trout Fishing in America. Nevertheless, this is one to read if you haven't before - if you found The Hawkline Monster and Dreaming of Babylon a bit mawkish, this is the book (alongside The Tokyo-Montana Express) that you should read to restore faith in Brautigan's underrated talents.