In Watermelon Sugar

iDEATH is a place where the sun shines a different color every day and where people travel to the length of their dreams. Rejecting the violence and hate of the old gang at the Forgotten Works, they lead gentle lives in watermelon sugar. In this book, Richard Brautigan discovers and expresses the mood of the counterculture generation.

©1968 Richard Brautigan (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

A forgotten favorite

The inventiveness and curious beauty of Richard Brautigan is a national treasure. I almost forgot how much I love this man’s writing. I was also pleasantly surprised to find Bronson Pinchot, a perennial favorite to this 80s child, to be such a captivating narrator. This book and Trout Fishing in America (of course) are a good place to start if you’re unfamiliar with Brautigan.

Love

Nice shot story to listen to while you drink your coffee and feed bugs to your ducks.

A period piece

I loved this book when I found it on my parents bookshelf as a kid, partly for the sex, partly for the fantasy setting: a rural commune where the sun shines different colors on the different days of the week, people are buried in glass coffins at the bottom of rivers, and things are built from planks made out of watermelon sugar. I did find it odd that the name of the place was iDEATH.

Listening to it now, it seems to be about the dark side of close knit groups: how they single out individuals who threaten their harmony and destroy them; how factional disputes end in violence which is perceived and remembered in distorted, mythological ways.

The other thing that jumps out to a modern reader is the sexist, patriarchal ethos of the back to the land movement.

20 years later, Brautigan was living again in Bolinas California where the novel was written and maybe inspired by, when he killed himself.

In spite of all that, it’s a beautiful book, streamlined, fantastical, never boring. The reader’s style is just right for the material. I wish he raised the pitch of his voice a little less for women’s voices.

Euphoric for some reason that's hard to describe!

absolutely loved how simple and calming the story was. definitely took me to Ideath it self.

Enjoyable novella.

The work starts out strong and poetic. Surrealistic and inexplicable moments happen throughout the book. The ending is not as satisfying as the beginning.