In Watermelon Sugar
SEATTLE – 2008.02.23 – BOOKS I’VE READ
So somehow this book came to me. I think it’s Gelly’s, and then via Ryo? It’s a beat to shit thing by Richard Brautigan, who I learned from Amazon is a crazy ass psychadelic author, who writes these really surreal short novels, that basically make you feel like you’re on drugs.
The whole thing is told kinda like mythology, or a children’s fable or something, short one or two page chapters, with tiny sentances that are directly to the point. The world that they describe though is a mind fuck that had me laughing at least on every page.
So in this world, there are only a few building materials. Sure there are trees, and stones. But everything else seems to be made out of processed watermelon sugar. The bridges, windows (and glass), statues, clocks, and tombs that sit on the bottom of the rivers are made from watermelons. These watermelons have seven colors, and like the sun, take on a different color based on the day.
Everyone lives in this village called iDeath, but the village is either one big building or just the woods, I’m not sure. For instance, to get to the kitchen from the living room, you walk under a river, and in the living room there are couches next to trees, etc. Who knows what this thing is.
There’s some darkness to this thing too. Some crazy dude named inBoil, lives in an old junkyard, (which is where the remnants of our current civilzation are, long after people have forgotten how to use them). He’s a drunk, and he recruits other drunks, and one day they go crazy, read below.
There are also tigers, that once upon a time did battle witht he humans, regualarly eating them, etc, see below. They speak and can do multiplication that is sometimes correct.
The tombs are interesting, all the dead are buried under water, in illuminated glass tombs, that you can see as you walk over the bridges throughout the village.
Oh, and everyone’s crazy. The book’s like 100 pages of kiddie level reading, but that’s the point. The writing style and weird world where I think our name’s for things dont coincide with those in the text, (the “watermelon”s in the book may not even be fruit or anything similar in our world. Ditto, “tiger”s may just be some kind of cannibalistic human off shoot, and not animals at all.), but all of these things add up to a pretty surreal experience.
LOOK, JUST READ THESE THREE PAGES, and if they dont convince you, skip this article. Crazy ass tigers.
There, if that doesn’t convince you, then you’re just lazy and didn’t read it.
I’m planning on buying this collection of a couple of Brautigan’s stories, including In Watermelon Sugar, to see if all of his stuff is this crazy. Recommended if you are weird.