I’ve chosen ‘Sand Castles’ from Brautigan’s only short story collection, a brief account of a visit to Point Reyes Peninsula, which is “fastened like a haunted fingerprint to the California coast” and where “Hawks circle in the sky like the lost springs of old railroad watches”. The author parks his car and hikes down through a canyon “which of course unfolded like layers of abstraction and intimacy” to a beach “like a photograph if they’d had cameras in the time when Christ lived.”
But it’s a sham. What I really want, if Brautigan is new to you, is to get you to read his novels—Sombrero Fallout, in which a black cat is described as a suburb of a Japanese lover’s hair, The Abortion, a kinder and more uplifting work than its title would suggest, or maybe Trout Fishing in America. Any of them, really.
Another from ‘Sand Castles’: “I stared at the watercress in the creek. It looked wealthy.”
First collected in Revenge of the Lawn, Simon & Schuster, 1971, now available from Canongate Press, 2014
A Personal Anthology 