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| [b.1935 - d.1984 Suicide.] Doesn't his hand on the mailbox look deformed? I've stared at it for so long and can't figure it out. |
"...the professor took to thinking too long about things that were not important. Once he spent two hours thinking about an iceberg. He had never spent more than a few moments previously in all of his life thinking about icebergs."
This book killed me. And by kill I mean it was like Whoosh! and I was off in Oregon with two professional killers. One who counts things and one who is curious, both of whom I dearly loved. When I had finished the book it was like Plop! and I was back in my disappointingly real life with no happy ending to the story to console myself with. It was fun to read, like something by Vonnegut or Francesca Lia Block, I think, mainly because of the combination of the rock-solid-concrete prose and kooky story material. Brautigan was probably on some heavily-influential 'chemicals' while getting this one out. Considering that, it was probably fun to write this book as well.
I guess from the title you can guess that this book isn't about normal people doing normal things, like washing dishes or blogging. I wish we didn't have to cry Metaphor! at everything that is not based in reality. I want to be able to take this book at face value, but I guess you can't do that after a certain age when you are finally able to buy a bottle of crappy wine from Target. It's a real downer that everything has to have a meaning.
The Hawkline Monster. What?
The Hawkline Monster controls minds. It is a very bad, evil monster. It doesn't kill anything directly, it enslaves people or makes them into something else, like furniture. It also makes people want to climb into each other's beds with alarming rapidity. The Hawkline Monster has a conscience, which is its helplessly weak little shadow.
This sounds like drugs. Drugs are the metaphor, right?
Wrong, bitch! It's clinical depression.
Well, whatever you want the Hawkline Monster to be in reality, it is really just some tricksy pool of light invented by a blonde haired man who shot himself in the head with a .44 Magnum. [That sentence makes me want to cry.] The weird thing with Brautigan is that the Hawkline Monster of this story gets defeated and turned into something 'good,' but which ultimately does not lead to the happiness of its characters. It does not even bring them closer together. What brought them together was the Hawkline Monster, the 'bad.' It's a befittingly strange conclusion to a strange story, one I will be re-reading and calling the library to break to them the sorry news that someone, some thief, has stolen their book from my...car.
Year published: 1974 Pages: 216
