Saturday, September 29, 2018

Ms. Hen reviews Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar




Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar
Richard Brautigan
Houghton Mifflin Company
1967, 1968


Ms. Hen read TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA many years ago, when she was a young hen. She had read in the newspaper that a high school student changed his name to Trout Fishing in America, and she thought it was the strangest thing she had ever heard. She wanted to know why a person would change their name to the name of a book. She happened to find a copy of the book in her house, which was odd; whoever lived in the house before had left it behind. The book was moldy and it smelled, but she read it, and she was able to comprehend why a person would change his name to the name of this book. The novel isn’t about trout fishing, even though there is trout fishing in every chapter. It’s about everything in the world, and it’s about the meaning of life, and how the totality of existence means that the universe is strange and nothing makes sense. She understood the book when she read it back then, but did not hold on to her copy. She bought another copy recently for her trip to San Francisco because she remembered it was a San Francisco novel. And it is. She did read some of it on her vacation, and she finished it on the plane ride home. She looked up the man who changed his name to Trout Fishing in America, and she discovered that now he teaches English in Japan.

In this book are two other books, a book of poetry, THE PILL VERSUS THE SPRINGHILL MINE DISASTER, which Ms. Hen did not read, because she finds it difficult and tedious to read poetry, even though she does write it, sometimes reading it makes her eyes cross; it also contains IN WATERMELON SUGAR, which Ms. Hen truly enjoyed.

IN WATERMELON SUGAR is about a town made of watermelon sugar. There is no location or state mentioned where the town is located, but Ms. Hen imagines it is in California. This book is quirky. The protagonist does not have a name, and he is writing a book and he does not know the subject. He lives in a small town, and bizarre things have happened there. Tigers once roamed the town and killed people. A gang of dangerous men ran around and harassed people, who ended up in a bloodbath. Ms. Hen thinks she liked this more than TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, because it was more of a linear narrative, and she could understand the characters better. But the message is the same, nothing makes any sense in the world, and some things are just demented and distorted, but we have to do the best we can to find happiness.

Ms. Hen learned that Richard Brautigan committed suicide at the age of forty-nine. It made her sad to think that someone so talented and intelligent could take his own life. She thought of other writers who killed themselves: Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf. She thinks that they might have felt the world too deeply and honestly and that drove them to take their own lives. The world can be an insane and erratic place, and sometimes people can’t survive. Ms. Hen mourns for these writers, and their stars that shone and had so much to say, but were dimmed too soon.

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