This book is...oh, so Richard Brautigan! Some of what he writes is bizarre, some is poetic, and some is a message. However, it's up to the reader to try to decipher the meaning of his narrative.

In this book, the bizarre is a sombrero, with a temperature of 24 degrees below zero, falling out of the sky. The sombrero, standing alone invites chaos and killing.

The poetic is the sadness of the narrator losing the love of a Japanese woman whom he lived with and adored for two years. He is now left with only one strand of her black hair.

"She had a beautiful laugh which was like rain water pouring over daffodils made from silver."

The messaage of this story to me was that killing is senseless.

Though not the best of Brautigan's books, I found this small volume fun to read, full of notable quotes, and strange ideas. I liked it! ( )

town rises up in riot against the librarian getting her ears shot off, while an American humorist obsesses over an ex-lover whose cat midnight snacks while she dreams of kyoto and her father. also, a cold sombrero. ( )

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/64955431719/richard-brautigan-and-the-sombrero-fal...

Would you consider please for a moment at least that by the time Sombrero Fallout was composed Richard Brautigan was up to his neck in his own shit and desperate for relief? Alcohol only fueled his confusion over a life he was swiftly losing control over. The epoch of his fame provided a false security and nothing he attempted in his order to personally derail it could prove his life was finally off the tracks. Appearances aside, life for Dick was not that good. It is not surprising to me that life on the ranch in Montana was ghostly similar to this book and the mob's response downtown and the destruction being wrought on its citizens. It has been widely reported that Brautigan had a crazy love for guns and the shooting of them, disregarding the safety of even children in his drunken wild west escapades in blowing to smithereens all manner of objects, even those within the confines hanging on the walls of his house. It is obvious by this time that the man had almost lost his mind. But he could still write and this book certainly proved it.

It has been said that Sombrero Fallout was written in response to his breakup with his Chinese girlfriend Siew-Hwa Beh. The pain of separation from her and the now unrequited fantasy of having an Asian woman in his bed and at his side was something Brautigan was not equipped to cope with. Given his emotional instability due to his own escape after years living within the environment of a dysfunctional family of origin as well as dealing with it medicinally by the heavy use of alcohol and careless living Brautigan would be soon living on his own borrowed time. Though the pleasant memories described in this book regarding the narrator's so-called Japanese lover were warm and tender, anger and jealousy roared in the background through his use of humor and language so deft that my smiles broke out constantly throughout the first half of this book. Brautigan's one-liners were certainly a gift he mined well and often. He wrote out his similes and metaphors in long sentences instead of using one descriptive word or two. Even the parallel story regarding the ice-cold sombrero and the gathering mob of townsfolk was ridiculously funny until it morphed into insanity and chaos.

I have often read other reviewers descriptions of Brautigan's writing as being whimsical. There is certainly something very childish about Brautigan's text which makes him endearing even in light of his pathetic and expanding neurosis. Recently I completed my reading of the long and drawn out biography Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan by William Hjortsberg and one cannot walk away from this book and still deny the disease that was ravaging for years the mind and body of this poor man. Thank goodness Brautigan had his writing in which to save himself for the time being. And when his writing eventually ran out on him during the decade following this first major breakup there was nothing left of the man but a shadow of himself and the notoriety surrounding him because of his delinquent behaviors he had regularly and publicly displayed.

Sombrero Fallout is a sad tale, but an important one I think for anyone dealing, or having dealt with, a broken relationship. Often the writing made me look back at the important details regarding my own love lost and the still-obsessive object of my long accomplishment of over thirty years. It is easy to take those we love for granted and in this book Brautigan gives us numerous reasons for not doing so. The narrator, on his hands and knees searching for a lost black hair of his Japanese love, conjured for me the great love the recently deceased poet Jack Gilbert had for his only wife Michiko Nogami and the poem he wrote in her memory after she died of cancer in 1982.

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled

around the apartment, crying hard,

searching for my wife’s hair.

For two months got them from the drain,

from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,

and off the clothes in the closet.

But after other Japanese women came,

there was no way to be sure which were

hers, and I stopped. A year later,

repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find

a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

For the last year I have been revisiting the work of Richard Brautigan. For some ill-equipped and perhaps unconscionable reason this was my first reading of this book. It may now very well be my favorite, and this surprised me as I had previously thought he had already been used up by the time he wrote this book. But I was wrong back then and foolish in my thinking. I obviously did not know Dick. Brautigan was a special talent who achieved much in his writing. Richard Brautigan was of a class and upbringing society often disrespects and fails to credit appropriately. But he was definitely an original in life and especially in his writing. There are five words regarding the writing of RB that I wish for you to consider. The following words express my evolving idea of his style, those being:

1. humorous
2. whimsical
3. bittersweet
4. eccentric
5. outrageous

Not a bad epitaph, and especially so from where, and who, he came from. ( )

A truly liberating novel which is hard to pigeonhole. Blazed a trail that many followed. ( )

An obsessional humourous writer attempts to start a new story, but the recent break-up of his relationship with a Japanese woman prevents him from concentrating on creating; he throws away the first sheet of his story, but it writes itself secretly in the bin. Meanwhile, in classic Brautigan fashion, we see what goes through the mind of the writer, and explore the dreams of the Japanese woman as she sleeps, oblivious of everything else. ( )