Sombrero Fallout

by Richard Brautigan

Concerns a writer trying to cope with the break-up of a relationship. Trying to escape his misery, he begins a story about a sombrero that falls out of the sky and lands in a small town. Unable to concentrate he throws the pages in the bin, and that's when it starts to take on a life of its own.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, Poetry, Humor, American, The United States Of America

187 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Richard Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short-story writer. Born in Tacoma, Washington, he moved to San Francisco in the 1950s and began publishing poetry in 1957. He started writing novels in 1961 and is probably best known for his early work Trout Fishing in America. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1984.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sombrero Fallout is kick-started in a weird way:

‘A sombrero fell out of the sky and landed on the Main Street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin and a person out of work. The day was scrubbed clean by the desert air. The sky was blue. It was the blue of human eyes, waiting for something to happen. There was no reason for a sombrero to fall out of the sky. No airplane or helicopter was passing overhead and it was not a religious holiday.’

This odd beginning had been written and thrown away by the writer in despair and despair may have really strange outlets… So the sombrero and its inventor had parted their ways and further on both of them went their own fantastic paths…
This is an author in distress:

He was not a good-looking man. He had an attractive but very erratic personality. He allowed his moods to dominate him and they were very changeable. Sometimes he would talk too much and at other times he wouldn’t talk at all. He always talked too much when he drank. When he wasn’t drinking he was very shy and formal around people and it was hard to get to know him. Some people thought that he was very charming and others thought that he was a total asshole. The truth lay somewhere in between and it was very close to the halfway mark.

And what was the nature of despair? Its origin was as classical as a classical rock song: “My baby left me, She wouldn’t tell a lie… And she left me high and dry.”
But mostly Sombrero Fallout is about the power of imagination and its relationships with real life.

He experienced the basics of love ended.
Of course in his case these emotions were being played through a kaleidoscope of goofiness and insanity. But still he suffered genuinely and realistically as any other person. After all, he was still human…
Phantoms and fantasies of love raced back and forth across his mind, galloping as if on horses frenzied by snakes with no place else to go.

There are too many things that may be imagined about the world but reality is always different.

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

He reached into the typewriter as if he were an undertaker zipping up the fly of a deadman in his coffin and removed a piece of paper with everything that has been written here except for his crying...

* * *

Yukiko rolled over...
And her hair followed, dreaming as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving...
It was a black cat, and could have been a suburb of her hair.

* * *

Meanwhile, in the waste paper basket...


* * *


Two stories, simultaneous and in proximity but otherwise unrelated unfold before us. In one, a poignant tale of loss and heartbreak, we follow an American humorist in his late night mourning of his failed relationship, and enter the peaceful dreams of his lost love, asleep across town. The second story takes place in the humorist’s waste paper basket, and involves magical sky sombreros, a town gone mad, death, mayhem, and destruction, and Norman Mailer.
Welcome to the mind of Richard Brautigan.

Sombrero Fallout resulted from a challenge Brautigan set for himself to write five different genre novels in five years. (He ended up writing four.) Here he took on the Japanese I-novel, a type of confessional literature where the events in the story correspond to events in the author’s life. (It was the Japanese reaction to naturalism.) The story of the broken relationship clearly mirrors one of Brautigan’s own. (If you’ve read his biography you can even pinpoint which one.) The wild, magical realism mayhem going on in the waste basket may be a metaphor for the author’s mental and emotional state.

This strange, sad, beautiful and crazy book may just be the most Brautigan of all Brautigan novels.

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/6495543...

Would you consider please for a moment at least that by the time Sombrero Fallout was composed Richard Brautigan was up to his neck in his own shit and desperate for relief? Alcohol only fueled his confusion over a life he was swiftly losing control over. The epoch of his fame provided a false security and nothing he attempted in his order to personally derail it could prove his life was finally off the tracks. Appearances aside, life for Dick was not that good. It is not surprising to me that life on the ranch in Montana was ghostly similar to this book and the mob's response downtown and the destruction being wrought on its citizens. It has been widely reported that Brautigan had a crazy love for guns and the shooting of them, disregarding the safety of even children in his drunken wild west escapades in blowing to smithereens all manner of objects, even those within the confines hanging on the walls of his house. It is obvious by this time that the man had almost lost his mind. But he could still write and this book certainly proved it.

It has been said that Sombrero Fallout was written in response to his breakup with his Chinese girlfriend Siew-Hwa Beh. The pain of separation from her and the now unrequited fantasy of having an Asian woman in his bed and at his side was something Brautigan was not equipped to cope with. Given his emotional instability due to his own escape after years living within the environment of a dysfunctional family of origin as well as dealing with it medicinally by the heavy use of alcohol and careless living Brautigan would be soon living on his own borrowed time. Though the pleasant memories described in this book regarding the narrator's so-called Japanese lover were warm and tender, anger and jealousy roared in the background through his use of humor and language so deft that my smiles broke out constantly throughout the first half of this book. Brautigan's one-liners were certainly a gift he mined well and often. He wrote out his similes and metaphors in long sentences instead of using one descriptive word or two. Even the parallel story regarding the ice-cold sombrero and the gathering mob of townsfolk was ridiculously funny until it morphed into insanity and chaos.

I have often read other reviewers descriptions of Brautigan's writing as being whimsical. There is certainly something very childish about Brautigan's text which makes him endearing even in light of his pathetic and expanding neurosis. Recently I completed my reading of the long and drawn out biography Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan by William Hjortsberg and one cannot walk away from this book and still deny the disease that was ravaging for years the mind and body of this poor man. Thank goodness Brautigan had his writing in which to save himself for the time being. And when his writing eventually ran out on him during the decade following this first major breakup there was nothing left of the man but a shadow of himself and the notoriety surrounding him because of his delinquent behaviors he had regularly and publicly displayed.

Sombrero Fallout is a sad tale, but an important one I think for anyone dealing, or having dealt with, a broken relationship. Often the writing made me look back at the important details regarding my own love lost and the still-obsessive object of my long accomplishment of over thirty years. It is easy to take those we love for granted and in this book Brautigan gives us numerous reasons for not doing so. The narrator, on his hands and knees searching for a lost black hair of his Japanese love, conjured for me the great love the recently deceased poet Jack Gilbert had for his only wife Michiko Nogami and the poem he wrote in her memory after she died of cancer in 1982.

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled

around the apartment, crying hard,

searching for my wife’s hair.

For two months got them from the drain,

from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,

and off the clothes in the closet.

But after other Japanese women came,

there was no way to be sure which were

hers, and I stopped. A year later,

repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find

a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

For the last year I have been revisiting the work of Richard Brautigan. For some ill-equipped and perhaps unconscionable reason this was my first reading of this book. It may now very well be my favorite, and this surprised me as I had previously thought he had already been used up by the time he wrote this book. But I was wrong back then and foolish in my thinking. I obviously did not know Dick. Brautigan was a special talent who achieved much in his writing. Richard Brautigan was of a class and upbringing society often disrespects and fails to credit appropriately. But he was definitely an original in life and especially in his writing. There are five words regarding the writing of RB that I wish for you to consider. The following words express my evolving idea of his style, those being:

1. humorous
2. whimsical
3. bittersweet
4. eccentric
5. outrageous

Not a bad epitaph, and especially so from where, and who, he came from.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favourite Brautigan so far. As always, there is dream logic everywhere. You are in the middle of a scene without a beginning or end, and everything makes sense if and only if you go along with it. There is a sombrero that falls out from the sky and it’s -24 F for some reason. Two people are convinced that, if they touch it, they will attain their hopes and dreams. The mayor of the town is there and he is important. The main character is an American humorist and he actually does not play into the sombrero narrative at all. He knows nothing about this sombrero. He is just sitting there, going through the motions of a storyline that… tore me? I did not expect to be exposed to myself so harshly in the middle of a Brautigan book. But then I found out why the American humorist was going through what he was going through. And his situation fit mine like a glass slipper. And it was weird.

[صان · Rating 5 out of 5]

خیلی وقت از براتیگان خوندنم میگذره، اما حس میکنم این کتاب فوق‌العاده بود و یکی از بهترین‌هاش.

کتاب دو داستان‌ تعریف می‌کنه که به نظر من بی‌ربط میان. یا هنوز نتونستم ارتباط معنایی بینشون رو بفهمم. اما ایده‌ی شروع داستان نویسنده و بالیدنش به تنهایی خیلی محشره. بخش‌های تنهایی نویسنده پر ‌از جزئیات درخشان و لحظه‌های احساسی دقیق و به دور از پیچیدگی و انسانیه. به دور از شرم. ماجرای از دست دادن یک عشق و روایت یک شبِ نویسنده‌ای دل‌شکسته.

از سمت دیگه در بخش‌هایی معشوق ژاپنی رو می‌بینیم که خوابه و گربه‌ش در اتاقش می‌چرخه و به خواب‌هاش سرک می‌کشیم و باز پر از جزئیات و سکوت و شب و شهر و باران و نور.

در سمت کلاه مکزیکی، شورشی عجیب و بزن‌بزن‌هایی غریب می‌بینیم و منطق خیلی وقته از اون شهر رفته. سبک بی‌منطق براتیگان در این داستان به اوج می‌رسه و دیوونه‌بازیای کمدیش اینجا بیشتره. واقعا می‌شه خندید باهاش. بعد یهو میریم توی داستان نویسنده و اون سکوت و فضای دردناکش.

این رمان برای من پر از لحظه‌های کوچک انسانی و شعرگون بود. پر از واقعیت و صداقت. برای همین خیلی دوستش داشتم و باز هم به سراغش خواهم اومد. با مویی لای انگشتانم کله‌ای پر از فکر ساندویچ تن ماهی.

منطق‌های عجیب براتیگان در همه جای این رمان دیده می‌شه.

[Ben Loory · Rating 5 out of 5]

any book that starts every other chapter with "Meanwhile, in the waste paper basket" is okay by me.

"I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was too complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it.

She wanted her next lover to be a broom."

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Broken up into three alternating narrative threads - one continuing from the pages dumped in a waste-paper basket, this was a barking mad, surreal, magical, laugh out loud, touching and profound little novel. A sombrero, with a temperature of -24 degrees, lands in an American town. A small crowd gathers, which becomes a large one, which in turn causes the townsfolk to go hysterical and start a riot that rages out of control. The police force kill themselves in a head-on collision, Norman Mailer arrives as a war correspondent, before the National Guard, paratroopers and Special forces are called in . . . . meanwhile, a despairing American humourist is nursing a broken heart over his Japanese lover - even combing his floor with a magnifying glass looking for strands of her hair . . . . meanwhile she, Yukiko, only sixteen blocks away, with her purring cat at her side, sleeps and is dreaming beautiful dreams of Kyoto, Seattle and her dead father - he took his own life after Yukiko's mother had an affair with an American serviceman. Once again I was so impressed with Brautigan's imagination running wild. This one, more so than the others I've read, reminded me a lot of French writer Boris Vian. Damn, if only those two got to collaborate on a novel!

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a couple of novels by Richard Brautigan back in the 1970s, when I was a teenager. I remember enjoying them a great deal although even at the time I thought they had a real "sixties" feel and that I had missed that whole sixties counterculture thing with which the author was closely identified (although, having himself been brought up in extreme poverty, Brautigan was apparently contemptuous of those who affected to reject materialism). I had pretty much forgotten about him until a few years ago when this novel got a burst of publicity in the U.K. after the pop singer Jarvis Cocker nominated it as his favourite book.

The novel starts with an American writer moping about his ex-girlfriend, a Japanese woman who had dumped him a month before. He starts a new story about a frozen sombrero that falls from the sky in front of 3 men and starts an argument between them. The writer decides he doesn't like the story, so he rips up the paper and throws it in the bin, where it takes on a life of its own. From then on the novel switches between the writer, who continues to obsess about his ex; the Japanese woman herself, who is having a dream; and the sombrero thread, in which the original argument escalates into a full scale riot with massive bloodshed.

The early part of the sombrero thread is really very funny, but it turns quite disturbing before the humour is re-asserted near the end, when the author works in a hilarious appearance by Norman Mailer. I'm not sure whether Brautigan was making a point about how paper thin the divide is between civilisation and law and order on the one hand and brutish, bloodthirsty anarchy on the other. He might have been, but with Brautigan you also get the impression that he just writes whatever random thoughts come into his head, and he possessed an almost unlimited imagination. This is definitely the wackiest novel I have read since...well, since the 1970s when I last read anything by Richard Brautigan. It's fun though.

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“What is happening?”
“I don’t know!”
“I’m afraid!” an old man shouted.
“This is ridiculous!” a teen-age girl shouted.

San Francisco weather report: Sunny, with a chance of sombreros falling out of the sky.

Are sombreros even worn by the Japanese? Because the subtitle promises the reader A Japanese Novel. And it is, at a certain immediate level, the story of a heart-broken American humorist grieving for his lost Japanese lover. The sombrero subplot is a completely different kettle of fish. Only it kind of takes over the novel on its own, once the narrator gets distracted by thoughts of food or hair or loss.
It all starts as a humorous sketch, but then it gets derailed. This also happened in the only other book by Brautigan that I read Dreaming of Babylon : the separation between author and character gets blurry, permeable. Same with the border between reality and dream, poetry and prose, the personal and the political, the fictional and the autobiographical.
It’s a heady mix for me, because the free form allows for so many interpretations, engaging the reader into ways to solve the riddles of the plot. But what if there is no riddle and no plot? What if this is just a journal that records the artist’s thoughts, a mirror of his febrile imagination and sensitive heart?

She was a thousand pieces of a puzzle tumbling around in his mind as if they were in a dryer in a Laundromat.

He wasted a lot of time thinking about things that never came to anything. Often his mind turned into a popcorn popper over the simplest of things.

A lot of critics struggle to apply to Brautigan their ready-made labels, like Beat-poet or late blooming hippy, humorist or social commentator. It’s like fitting a square peg into a round hole, I think. Brautigan is his own country, plays by his own rules, listens to a different drum. What is most important for me is the conviction that he is honest, raw and troubled. There is one key passage in this novel, where the narrator is puzzled why he is considered a humorist, when the stories he tries to write are tragic?

He sat on the couch with his hands trembling from the opposite polarities of tuna fish sandwich attraction and fear.

Those tears had to come from someplace, so it might as well be from hidden crying springs that came from deep in the earth and flowed great distances, originating at cemeteries and from cheap hotel rooms decorated in loneliness and despair.

>>><<<>>><<<

But what about the sombrero? the exasperated reader might ask. And what’s the deal with the Japanese woman? Why are Norman Mailer and Waylon Jennings in the book? What has Attica to do with San Francisco?
As I said earlier, you are free to come up with your own answers:

It was truly a sombrero for all seasons.

I have three more bookmarks and one biographical detail that I hope I can include here in my sketch of a review without revealing the plot or applying my own bias on the text:

The crowd had taken a liking to his first words of weapon introduction and now they were all shouting, “Guns for killing! Guns for killing!”

In other words: There is more to life than meets the eye.

“She’s my little lady from Japan
and I love her as much as I can.
Her hair is black and her skin is like moonlight.
I love to put my arms around her and hold her tight.”

>>><<<>>><<<

In support of my claim that the author wasn’t faking it, here’s an observation found easily on his wiki page:

"When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water," said his friend and fellow writer, Thomas McGuane. "He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy."

Like too many gentle, troubled and odd guys, Brautigan took his own life at 49. This is not the detail that breaks my heart, but the fact that he was all alone in the world, like the humorist in this novel. His body was not discovered until a whole month had passed.

[مهسا ✿ · Rating 4 out of 5]

همونطور که حدس می‌زدم، اون خانم فروشنده تو نمایشگاه کتاب بهم دروغ گفته بود و این جلد دوم ویلارد و جایزه‌های بولینگش نبود. ای خانم دروغگو.
این کتابو از ویلارد و جایزه‌های بولینگش بیشتر دوست داشتم. این که چقدر زیبا داستان داشت تو سطل زباله‌ی خونه‌ی یک طنز نویس برای خودش ادامه پیدا می‌کرد خیلی جالبه.

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

A unique and original story with themes of the bizarre.

This would fit nicely in the recent bizarro stories that have been published.
Neat little chapters and very economical choice of words in each sentence. There seems to be a darker message to this story than it just being a wacky story about a Japanese woman, a hair, a sombrero and the fallout.
Intelligently crafted humor with a literary work of sorts that catches the readers thoughts and memory. I read this due to Canongate providing me with a free copy to read of a new edition that has an excellent introduction from Jarvis Cocker mentioning his high regard for this story that was previously hard to find in bookstores or in print in general.

The main protagonist a writer and a humorist is obsessed with his, lost love a Japanese woman and a sombrero from a story he wrote.
He clearly explains his obsession with her and particularly a strand of her hair in this excerpt.

“A huge sigh hurricaned his body and then he sat down on the couch. He tried to sort it all out. She was a thousand pieces of a puzzle tumbling around in his mind as if they were in a dryer in a Laundromat.
For a few moments his mind was simultaneously the past, the present and the future, and there was no form to his thoughts about her. The her hair began to emerge as a dominate theme in his grief. He had always loved her hair. It was somewhat of an obsession with him. Thoughts of her hair, how long and dark and hypnotic it was, began to put pieces of the puzzle together until he was remembering the first time he met her.”

AND

“To some men the most beautiful sight in this world is a sleeping Japanese woman. The sight of her long black hair floating beside her like dark lilies makes them want to die and be transported to a paradise that is filled with sleeping Japanese women who never wake but sleep on for all time, dreaming beautiful dreams.
Yukiko could easily have been the queen of such a paradise and reigned perfectly and majestically over a million sleeping Japanese women from horizon to horizon.”

He points out a few facts about this strange sombrero in this excerpt from this novel.

“1. It fell out of the sky.
2. It is size 7 ¼.
3. It is very cold.
Here are a few more details about the sombrero that should be of some use:
4. The sombrero is black.
5. It is know that the sombrero is very cold but the exact temperature has not been revealed before. Here it is: The temperature of the sombrero 24 degrees below zero.
6. That’s a cold sombrero.
7. Especially when the temperature in the street is 81 and the sombrero’s temperature stays at 24 below. It is not affected by the sun.
8. That makes it a very different sombrero.”

Also he adds later
“1. It was not made in Mexico.
2. Yes, it did belong to somebody but they were very faraway.”

From a sombrero to an obsession with a beautiful Japanese woman and her strand of hair to a fear of tuna.

“Why did the American humorist have such a big problem with tuna fish? The answer is quite simple: fear. He was afraid of it. He was thirty-eight years old and afraid of tuna fish. Its that simple. The reason for the fear was mercury”

http://more2read.com/review/sombrero-fallout-by-richard-brautigan/

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

My introduction to Brautigan came when his play on genre fiction in Hawkline Monster and Dreaming of Babylon caught my eye, and whilst those works were impressive, somewhat whimsical and eccentric Sombrero Fallout is a whole new realisation as to the quality of the man's vision for what literature could be. That it took a new introduction from Jarvis Cocker to get me to pick up what many fans feel is his best work as my next Brautigan experience probably says more about me than it should. Especially as I never read introductions to books. If it's good enough for my teen idol then its damned sure good enough for me.

Picked by Cocker as the sole book he would take for a lifetime stranded on a desert island in 2005, this decision earned him a nice fee seven years later when Canongate published their Canongate Canons range. It's an odd choice, what with the brief length, the percentage of blank pages and the empty spaces that seem to be a trademark of a Brautigan publication and yet it's a book that will almost certainly reveal much more with repeated readings unlike one of the more traditional choices, a book more dense that explains every thought and action of every character for example.

They say Brautigan was losing his mind whilst writing Sombrero Fallout, exacerbated by the loss of his lover. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, the story of one evening in the life of a famous American Humorist, who has been driven crazy by sustained excellence, dealing with an overwhelming heartbreak after his Japanese lover has left him certainly lends itself to those autobiographical theories. Much can be read in to these chapters, much taken from them as they become a meditation on the nature of heartbreak and self image, if you're that way inclined.

They alternate with chapters of that much overused literary device, the novel within the novel. This novel is the surreal aftermath of an ice cold sombrero falling from the sky, a bizarre incident that somehow sparks a riot that turns in to 11,000 previously sensible people on a bloodthirsty rampage. This too can be read in any number of ways, I prefer the allegory for the author's mental breakdown in the wake of the shock departure of his lover. I'm a hopeless romantic at heart.

Almost from the first page I found myself entranced by Brautigan, enamoured of his choice of words and subject matter like I hadn't been by previous works. It's a fine work that more than deserves it's new publication.

[Sabra Embury · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite books, Sombrero Fallout alternates two stories into one -- between 1.) a frozen sombrero that mysteriously falls from the sky into a small town causing a commotion and 2.) a writer's obsession with a Japanese ex, whose well-illustrated dreams of her father and familiar places are guided by the bedside purring sounds of her cat in marathon bouts of sleep.

The stories are a mix of realist, absurd and whimsical happenings, which Brautigan's voice executes with a smart, romantic and unpretentious flare. His lines are simple and repetitious. His tone is gentle, thoughtful, and silly. His observations, at times profound in their relatability, are dolloped with notions of extra mayo tuna fish sandwiches, an erotic house key incident, a magnifying glass and a black strand of hair, an earless librarian, lines and lines of ornamental poetry, and Norman Mailer crawling out of a tank covered in the blood of decimated soldiers.

Here is one of my favorite passages: "I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was too complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it.

She wanted her next lover to be a broom."


I laughed out loud close to a dozen times reading Sombrero Fallout. Had five epiphanies about my own life, fell in love twice, and couldn't put it down while cooking an elaborate breakfast with sizzling eggs and real buttered toast, or commuting on a sidewalk by five o'clock traffic. I could say the book is dangerously distracting, but I'm sure I'll risk my life to read it again and again, regardless.

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brautigan is always a breath of fresh air. Sombrero Fallout is as brief (an hour to read from cover to cover) as it is bizarre. The conceit is not entirely coherent, but it is original, sincere, and interesting. The novel is a great catharsis for the author, as well as being a very heartfelt and poignant account of a difficult break-up.

[Shaghayegh.l3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

داستان کوتاهی که سرخوشی قشنگی داشت و به مذاق من که گرفتگی سنگینی داشتم خوش اومد.

[Fulya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Çok uzun bir süredir Beat kuşağından kimseler okumamıştım. Herhalde bir 10-15 sene vardır. Bu kitap o anlamda oldukça ilginç bir deneyim oldu. Daha gençken çok okurdum çünkü. Bu yaşımda hala zevk alabiliyor olmam iyi hissetirdi gerçekten. "Sombrero" karakterimiz olan yazarın hayatında ve zihninde aynı anda akan iki hikayeden oluşuyor. Her iki hikayeye de geri dönmek için sabırsızlanıyorsunuz. Yazar, gerçek hayatında Japon sevgilisinden ayrılmış ve aşk acısı çekiyor. Japon sevgilisi ise uyuyor ve çeşitli rüyalar görüyor. Yazarın bir taraftan aşk acısı çekerken bir taraftan yazıp çöpe attığı Sombrero üzerine bir öykü de çöp tenekesinde kendi kendine devam ediyor. Her iki hikaye de insanın sinir uçlarına dokunuyor ama oldukça özgün ve kendini merak ettiren türden hikayeler bunlar. Kısacası basmakalıp bir biçemden uzak, ilginç bir kitap "Sombrero".

Gelelim zurnanın zırt dediği yere. Ben anadiline aşık bir insanım, elimden geldiğince ona olan saygımdan Türkçeyi düzgün kullanmaya çalışırım. Güzel çevirileri ve Türkçede güzel bir üslupla verilmiş eserler okumaya bayılırım. Ama "Sombrero" onlardan biri değil. Dostum lanet olsun ki bu kitap bir 6.45 yayınevi tribi. 6.45 dile ve edebiyata HAKARET EDEN bu çeviriyi utanmadan basmış. Böyle rezil bir Türkçe olamaz. Kendi laubaliliklerini okuyucularına bulaştırmaya çalışıyorlar resmen. Ve bunu huy edinmişler. 6.45'ten ne okusam kafamda doğru Türkçeye konumlandırmaya çalışırken tüm okuma zevkimin içine ettiler. İstinası yok. Sokaktan orta derece İngilizce ve maalesef BAŞLANGIÇ SEVİYESİ TÜRKÇE bilen birilerini çevirip ellerine kitabı tutuşturuyorlar "al bunu çevir" diye. Kitabın 2 (yazıyla iki) çevirmeni, 0 (yazıyla sıfır) editörü var. Kitaptaki Türkçe cümleleri kafamda bir daha Türkçeye çeviriyorum. Brautigan bu çeviriyi okusa kafasına bir kurşun da bu çeviri için sıkardı. Yelpazesi bu kadar geniş bir yayınevinin çevirilerindeki bu özensizliği ne Brautigan ne de biz hak ettik. Aşağıya bazı cümleler koyuyorum kitaptan bakalım siz anlayabilecek misiniz.
Kitapta değişik sayfalarda ton balıklı sandviç, "tonlu sandviç, ton balıklı sandviç, ton balığı sandviçi" diye geçiyor. Daha bir kelimeyi bile doğru yazamıyorsunuz ya.
"Onun tek basit bir düşüncesi açlığını unutturmuştu". Türkçedeki sıfat tamlaması sıramalasını bilmekten acizler.
"Neredelerdi?
Yeterince basit.
Ölü" "Oldukça basit" yazamama acziyetine girmiyorum bile, ama "nerede?" sorusuna sadece 6.45 Türkçesinde bu cevap verilebilir herhalde.
"Sürükleyerek arabadan çıkardılar ve ona da güzel bir ölüm verdiler". Güzel bir ölüm vermek ne demek allahaşkına bir deyin bana ya!
Bu ve bunun gibi daha nice cümle düşüklüğü, anlamsız cümle, imla hatası, dizgi hatası ve neler neler var. Ama tam fecaat bir örnek kitabın aslından bir pasaj görünce karşıma çıktı. Kitapta kadın özetle diyor ki sevgilisi olan yazar Einstein'ın bile çözemeyeceği kadar karmaşık bir elektrik süpürgesine benziyordu. Bundan bezmişti ve bir dahaki sefere aynı hatayı tekrarlamamak adına bu kez çalı süpürgesi kadar karmaşık biriyle birlikte olacaktı. Bunu ben kitabın asıl metninden çevirdim. 6.45 çevirisinde ise ne elektrikli süpürge ne de çalı süpürgesi geçiyor. Bu muhteşem çeviride sadece "süpürge" olarak çevrilmiş her iki kelime de, yani güzide Türkçemizde bu espriyi bile bizden esirgemişler. Kadın bir süpürgeden ötekine sürükleniyor. Küfür ettim yemin ediyorum.

Altınıza da, kırk beşinize de, Kadıköy ahalinize de, kaybedenlerinize de, lemurlarınıza da, tribinize de, size de...

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a funny brautigan burlesque.

A tale about acheing/pining for a lost Japanese lover who is gone, never to return, her purring cat, the lover's hair and the torn-up remnants of a story which becomes self-aware and writes the rest of its own story after being confined to the waste paper basket.

In the wastepaper basket story, which runs parallel with the narrative of what is happening in 'true reality', the situations gets out of hand over a -24 degree sombrero.

[Reza Abedini · Rating 3 out of 5]

يك مزخرفِ سه ستاره

داستان حول سه موضوع در جريانه.

احوالاتِ دروني يك طنزنويس كه به تازگي معشوقه ي ژاپني ش تركش كرده و اصلا حال درست و حسابي اي نداره . و اندكي ديوانه ست


دست نوشته هاي طنزنويس كه مچاله شده و داخل سطل زباله ست (جوري كه خواننده اونها رو از سطل زباله در مياره و ميخونه و همين كتاب رو تشكيل ميده) و به شكل عجيبي تركيبي از مزخرفات ، سياست ، ژانر علمي تخيلي و اندكي طنز هست

و در آخر يوكيكو (معشوقه ي طنزنويس) كه در تمام روايت در كنار گربه ش خوابه و داره خواب ميبينه

[Rebeca · Rating 5 out of 5]

you might not like the story (you f***ing better) but, for the love of bowie, ain't that the prettiest cover you've ever seen?!

[Daisy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Brautigan must have lost a girl he really loved in real life.”
I kept thinking that when I was reading the booking.
There was just so much tenderness oozing from his portrayal of the quiet Japanese ex of the humorist.

“She had a beautiful laugh which was like rain water pouring over daffodils made from silver. “
“Her sleep movement was like an apple blossom fluttering to the ground in early May through absolutely still air. Nothing moves except the blossom that stops moving when it touches the earth.”

There was just so much sadness :

“The last room in the house would be her sleeping alone this evening, never wanting to see him again, with her hair lying beside her dreaming worlds of its own, echoing existences totally composed of protein where our souls have a different dimension and serve a different purpose.”
“She had given him all of her life that she could afford. She didn’t have any more life to give him. She wanted to have some to live herself.”

Then juxtaposed with the humorist’s descending into post breakup despair( bordering insanity) ,there was the storyline of the town’s absurdly horrifying outbursts of violence( Quentin Tarantino style almost), all of which started with a mysterious sombrero falling from the sky.
This part was satirical and surreal.
The world was collapsing in the humorist’s imagination (or subconsciousness), it could be a social commentary , it could also be a metaphor of the writer’s mental state, or most likely, it was Brautigan writing whatever he wanted to write and I need to put my analytical brain away …

“He was still staring at the torn pieces of paper in the waste-paper basket. He was staring very intently at them as they made friends with the abyss. They seemed to have a life of their own. It was a big decision but they decided to go on without him.”

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just slightly below Brautigan's highest, one thing immediately--and repeatedly--makes itself clear: this is some sad shit. The jokes feel half thrown, the melancholic nothing but haymakers. Damn.

[Fo · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب سبک خاصی دارد، شاید این سبک برای همه جذاب نباشد ولی من ایده داستان و شیوه روایت قصه را دوست داشتم. یک فقدان علت و معلولی خاصی در هر سه داستان کتاب وجود داشت، تقریبا هیچ چیز به هیچ چیز ارتباط نداشت و خوب این هم برای خودش ایده‌ای هست

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book always makes me laugh out loud. The book is divided among two "plots" if you will. The title of the book refers to a freezing white sombrero that falls from the sky and causes a small town to go crazy and riot.
The other story is about a humor writer and his longing for his former Japanese girlfriend who resides a mile and change away asleep at night with her cat on her bed dreaming nice dreams. My favorite lines from this book in no particular order which read like typical Brautigan poetry are:

"Her hair dreamt about being very carefully combed in the morning".

"He fumbled his clothes off like a football game being played in November mud".

"Her father was like the shadow purring of a cat".

"The cat's purring was the motor that ran the Japanese woman's dreaming".

And many more. The best I can describe this book is both a hilarious and extreme account of mass hysteria coupled with a weird love story. No one wrote like Brautigan.

[Jovi Ene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brautigan propune încă una din cărțile sale nebunești, în care elementele supranaturale se împletesc cu cele profund umane, cum ar fi dragostea, relațiile interetnice, disoluția și incompetența autorității. Este în același timp un roman plin de umor și un roman despre tristețea pierderii iubirii, un roman care pendulează între o relație ratată și scrierea unei cărți ce scapă de sub control scriitorului (ceea ce, probabil, a făcut conștient și Brautigan).
Categoric, una dintre cele mai bune cărți citite anul ăsta.

[Larnacouer de SH · Rating 2 out of 5]

What can i do sometimes?

[Alborz Baghipour · Rating 2 out of 5]

بارش کلاه مکزیکی آخرین آثری است که از براتگان به فارسی ترجمه شده و همین چند هفته پیش هم روانه ی بازار کتاب شد. مترجم هم فرید قدمی نازنین است. انتشار رمان تازه ای از براتیگان؟ چه خبری برای دوست دارانِ براتیگان از این بهتر؟ تا اینجا همه چیز خوب است، اما وقتی کتاب را می گیری و شروع به خواندن می کنی انتظاراتت یکهو نقش بر آب می شوند. بارش کلاه مکزیکی فضای سردی دارد، در آن از شوخی های جذاب براتیگان خبری نیست و به طور کلی با یک براتیگان بدبین طرف هستیم. راستش برخلاف هرآنچه از براتیگان تاکنون خوانده بودم، لذت چندانی از این رمانش نبردم و فقط تا آخر خواندمش که نیمه تمام رهاش نکرده نباشم

[Rebeccah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very odd but quite good. There were some beautiful passages with great imagery and strange but fitting metaphors. The fetishization of the Japanese woman was a little uncomfortable; the American author doesn’t miss *her*, just the fact that she was Japanese. Overall a good read.

[Zoe Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

MEANWHILE BACK IN the waste-paper basket -- what a way to start a chapter! And what is happening in the paper basket? The story discarded by the central character has decided it will continue without him. This is a magic realist story on both levels. It is metafiction and it contains a magical sombrero. What more could you want from a magic realist book?

I had been meaning to read some Brautigan as part of my magic realism challenge and then the opportunity to review this new edition by Canongate (with introduction by Jarvis Cocker) came up and I jumped at it. I am delighted I did - I love this book. It is a joy from start to finish.

I am not sure what I was expecting. I rather had Brautigan down as some hippy author and suspected that his magic realism would be whimsical. Indeed I have seen it described as such, but it isn't, not by my definition anyway. This book is funny, but it is also sad. The central character, a humourous fiction author with no sense of humour, is devastated by the loss of his Japanese lover. The poor woman has finally fled this relationship with a man who is so complex that he ties himself into knots over whether to eat a tuna sandwich (even though he has no tuna). She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it.
She wanted her next lover to be a broom.

Whilst her former lover obsesses about whether to ring her, imagining what she would say and that she is in the arms of another man, she is asleep and dreaming. The book shifts from the author to the woman and then into the story developing in the waste-paper basket. Nothing much happens in the "real life" stories: the writer is paralyzed by his revolving thoughts, the woman is simply sleeping, but Brautigan draws a brilliant picture of a relationship that is going nowhere.

Brautigan's writing style is so economical and yet so beautiful that it reminds me of Japanese haiku:

Yukiko rolled over.
That plain, that simple.
Her body was small in its moving.
And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.
It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.

That piece is one chapter in the book. Yes, a chapter. But what more is there to say?

Meanwhile back in the waste-paper basket the story is moving forward. The arrival of the frozen sombrero out of a blue sky starts a train of dramatic events: The crowd was becoming larger and more active... They were proceeding on schedule step by step down the path that would end with them battling Federal troops and cause their small town to be plunged into world focus. It wouldn't be long now. The comparison between the dynamic arc of the story, with its series of causes and effects, and the stasis in the life of the humourist is marked. Is this the difference between fiction and reality? But then the story of the humourist is also fictional.

But what about the sombrero? It's still there, lying in the street... How can you miss a very cold white sombrero lying in the Main Street of a town?
In other words: There is more to life than meets the eye.

Indeed there is. Wonderful!

I am very grateful to the publisher, Canongate, for allowing me to read this book in return for a fair review. It has been one of the highlights in my career as a reviewer.

This review first appeared on the Magic Realism Books Blog, where I review a magic r

[Mark Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘A SOMBRERO FELL out of the sky and landed on the Main Street of town in front of the mayor, his cousin and a person out of work’.

Any novel that begins with such a sentence deserves attention. Its casualness is intrepid – an ominous precursor to the lunacy that ensues. Forget any notion of how a novel should be structured: here all logic and reason are truant. Brautigan turns his back on convention, derivative of nothing and nobody; there are no margins.

Brautigan’s seventh novel, published in 1976, the Sombrero Fallout is a brief (177 short pages) sojourn into his bizarre counter-culture. He is often described as ‘the bridge between the Beat Movement of the 1950s and the youth revolution of the 1960s’ – this surreal metafiction is refreshing, and despite the peculiar plot, heartwarmingly lucid.

Sombrero Fallout’s inception runs two stories abreast. First: a successful writer is penning a story of a small, sleepy town that is thrown into disarray after an ice cold sombrero perplexingly falls out of the sky. Second: said writer is a heartbroken man yielding an unhealthy obsession with a girl who recently left him.

The opening pages map out the two interlinking plots. The three men attempt to understand the oddity of a sombrero randomly falling from the sky, while the reader is shown how poorly the writer is coping with his relationship breakdown, affecting him to such a degree that ‘some days he cried so much that he thought he was dreaming’. The anguish compels him to frustratingly tear what he has written so far into tiny pieces, eventually discarding them into a waste paper basket with plans to begin anew with a different story the following day.

If the opening sections of the novel aren’t peculiar enough, the fact that the torn up pieces of paper in the waste paper basket carry on the story themselves is beyond bizarre: ‘It was a big decision but they decided to go on without him’. Therein the sombrero and author go their separate ways. Sheer brilliance.

What follows is an amalgam of intense grief, self-pity and paranoia for the heartbroken man. He envisions his ex-girlfriend cheating on him, asking himself: ‘Who was she sleeping with?’, he thinks of her ‘moaning and moving under the weight of another man’s cock’, and fills many evenings in nostalgic hazes of memories and unbearable urges for her to be back beside him.

It truly encapsulates the vehemence of lovesickness; that inexorable abyss one sinks within without hope of return: a cesspit of emotion. He painstakingly searches on hands and knees for a single strand of her hair on his floor: ‘She had enough long black hair, Japanese hair, to keep on drowning him forever’. However, amidst his delusions: ‘he did not know that she slept alone’. In fact, she sleeps in extensive bouts and dreams unreservedly, all while her cat purrs gently – the purring acting as a lullaby, figuratively and literally a self-soothing agent in dealing with grief post-break up.

Just as the reader begins to tire of the heartbroken man’s overwhelming melancholia, a quirky narrative hook entices us back to the sombrero: ‘MEANWHILE BACK IN the waste-paper basket-’. And as the story develops, so does the madness. For something seemingly so benign – the hat has a lot to answer for. It throws the usually sleepy town into pandemonium: rioting, police brutality, burning police cars, the streets ‘littered with the wounded and dying’, baying crowds chanting ‘Death! Death! Death!’. Despite the chaos, the sombrero lies there: undisturbed, seemingly invisible.

One of the most compelling books I have ever had the pleasure of reading, and still possibly my favourite book ever written. Richard Brautigan is a sheer genius.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Work Gloves for a Gravedigger

At 187 pages, Sombrero Fallout (Simon and Schuster, 1976) is perhaps one of the world's longest suicide notes, beating out "Good Old Neon" (David Foster Wallace) but dwarfed by the collected works of Ernest Hemingway.

Brautigan died in 1984 of a self-inflicted gunshot. From 1976 to 1984 is eight years, which is a long time to camp your finger out on the Himalayas of a trigger. Waking up some mornings can feel like the eight years between sitting in a lawn chair on your neighbor's yard on the Independence Day Bicentennial gawking at the fireworks in the sky and sitting in front of your television to watch the Raiders tromp the Redskins 38-9 in Superbowl 18. It's like there being nothing else in the sky or on TV for that long-ass stretch of days and days. That's a lot of dark sky. That's a lot of blank TV screen. If you could measure out that much sky and cut and tailor, you could make a cloak for Mt. St. Helens. You could wrap that much TV screen around a telephone pole stretched from here to Mars. That's just simple math talking, not me.

Brautigan's clearly autobiographical writer-character in the suicide note, An American Humorist, projects his date of death as 2009. That's 25 years from 1976. A long time to ponder. It's like knowing every other day of the year that despite your best of intentions you will wait until Christmas Eve to buy your family its presents at the gas station, and every day juggling who gets work gloves and who gets chapstick.