Tag: Richard Brautigan

‘Sand Castles’ by Richard Brautigan

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

‘What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?’ by Richard Brautigan

It’s a rare January that doesn’t see me take Richard Brautigan’s The Tokyo-Montana Express off the shelf and turn to ‘What Are You Going to Do with 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees?’ It’s a perfect story for when Christmas and Hogmanay are past and everyone is skint and facing up to the realities of a new year. Brautigan’s “assassinated Christmas” will no doubt resonate with many this year in particular.

Much of what I love about the story typifies the best of Brautigan’s writing. His brevity, the almost visual clarity of his sentences, the perfect, offbeat simile and metaphor, and the sense of wonder alongside a keen awareness of poverty, loneliness and life’s other horrors. It is of course also very funny.

First published in The Tokyo-Montana Express, Delacorte Press, 1980

Nick Tartlon lives in Glasgow and struggles to find time to read in between working as a welfare rights adviser and looking after his 4 month old son’