"Rebel Inc" S.
3 total works
Revenge of the Lawn is Richard Brautigan in miniature and contains no fewer than 62 ultra-short stories set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the flower-powered San Francisco of the late fifties and early sixties. In their compacted form, which ranges from the murderously short "The Scarlatti Tilt" to one-page wonders like the sexually poignant poetry of "An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimetre Film", Brautigan's stories take us into a world where his fleeting glimpses of everyday strangeness leave stories and characters resonating in our heads long after they're gone. "Revenge of the Lawn" is Brautigan's only collection of short fiction and is generally regarded as the most autobiographical of his published work.
A heartbroken American writer starts a story about an ice-cold sombrero that falls inexplicably from the sky and lands in the centre of a small Southwest town. Devastated by the departure of his gorgeous Japanese girlfriend, he cannot concentrate on his writing and in frustration he throws away his beginning. But as the man searches through his apartment for strands of his lost love's hair, the discarded story in the wastepaper basket - through some kind of elaborate origami - carries on without him. Arguments over the sombrero begin, one thing leads to another and before long all hell breaks loose in the normally sleep town. Brautigan's fertile imagination twists and pulls at the ensuing chaos to come up with a tender, moving, surreal and incredibly funny tale that is told by a writer at the very peak of his creative powers.
