A Confederate General from Big Sur

by Richard Brautigan

Brautigan's excellent novel is definitely worth the quick read, then worth another to catch all his language play. Having grown up near Big Sur, this book was particularly funny as Lee Mellon is still in residence there.

Brautigan's descriptions of drugs, drinks, frogs & the commas of Ecclesiastes are all done in a straightforward style. A favorite paragraph:
"He broke the seal on the bottle, unscrewed the cap & poured a big slug of whiskey into his mouth. He swallowed it down with a hairy gulp. Strange, for as I said before: he was bald." A great read.

If there's one thing the world lacks, it's a good supply of well-written, funny-as-heck books. Luckily, aside from A Confederacy Of Dunces, we have this little gem. The characters are drunks, druggies, skanks, prostitutes & nutzoids. The pace is brisk, the imagry vivid. Most of it seemed to be part of my own life, but just where do you find weed that's so potent that 4 people smoking 5 joints stay high for well over 2 hours?

If you want to spend a day or night having a good laugh over a great book, pick this one up. You'll laugh out loud. As Martha Stewart says, "it's a good thing".

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

161 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

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]

A Confederate General from Big Sur is a hipster’s stuff cooked in the style of beatniks – a vagabond tale arrowed straight through the heart of the hobo jungle…

The dinner we had that evening was not very good. How could it be when we were reduced to eating food that the cats would not touch? We had no money to buy anything edible and no prospects of getting any. We were just hanging on.
We had spent four or five days waiting for someone to come along and bring us food, a traveller or a friend, it made no difference. That strange compelling power that draws people to Big Sur had not been working for days.

Drifters and dreamers – they go hand in hand and they try to stay outside of the system, following their own polestars…

The frogs would begin at twilight and go all night long. God-damn them. Frogs, barely the size of quarters. Hundreds, thousands, millions, light years of frogs in that small pond could make enough noise to break one’s soul like kindling.

The choric dithyramb of frogs is a tedious night music, it becomes a torture… But the the radical remedy was found…
But sooner or later everything comes to the end and suddenly the endings begin to multiply with the speed of light…
Every story has a right to end in its own way.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

1. This is such a charming wisp of a shy peeping dream of a book, so light a breath of wind would blow it away, so frail that if a frog sat on it it would be nothing but splinters.

2. I read it on American Election Day 2020 and the day after which is The Worst Political Hangover Day and no prizes for guessing that I had a powerful desire for all the charm I could find amidst such clanging dissonance. Richard Brautigan brings humour and balance and also frogs, alligators and dope smoking and shagging, not to put too fine a point upon it.

3. One way from Richard Brautigan is signposted Donald Barthelme 25 miles George Saunders 32 miles. Another direction from Richard Brautigan is signposted 1967 4 miles.

4. For example, here is a description of one erotic encounter : “We went away with each other like small republics to join the United Nations”. And here is twilight :

Night was coming in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide.

5. Unkindly we may say this is a few thin sketches of stoner life in California in the years just before the invention of the hippies, two guys scraping by with no money living in a hovel in Big Sur and indulging in predictable waywardness. Kindly, we may say that this is a charming wisp of a shy peeping dream of a book, so light a breath of wind would blow it away, so frail that if a frog sat on it it would be nothing but splinters.

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

late 60s San Francisco is something else and Lee Mellon is something else again.

sorta close by are little junky jerry-built huts in Big Sur. and frogs and a gator and weed and hippie chicks along for the ride and that's where our narrator and his redneck friend Lee Mellon eventually land.

Lee Mellon came to San Francisco, failing at life there, but what does failing even mean, really. failing is just a state of mind and no one in this book is failing except maybe that businessman, but no, he's just going sideways, into derangement, maybe that's the best place for him to be.

so anyway, Lee Mellon moves out of San Francisco to Oakland where he fails there again but it's not really failing it's living life the Lee Mellon way, so he up and moves to Big Sur and his friend our narrator soon joins him there. we the readers are just along for the ride, it's their ride all the way, it's a Brautigan ride, so you know that means clouds.

Lee Mellon, who cares if your supposed honorable relative the Confederate General wasn't really real, don't be sad Lee Mellon. good thing Lee Mellon doesn't know how to be sad, at least not for long.

this is a short book but long on whimsy, long on what they call the stream of the conscious or the sharing of thoughts or just lollygagging about, shooting the shit, drinking and smoking weed with people you feel comfortable with. it's short on sadness and it's short on pretension and it's short on not doing what you want to do with your life because it's your life, you should go on and live it, be a cloud. the book is written like Brautigan rolled out of bed, lit up a joint, and half-asleep he dreamed up a book and then all of a sudden it was right there in front of him.

everyone needs a friend like Lee Mellon, it's not like he's a good guy but he's a good friend and he's real interesting and this book is a lot like Lee Mellon. I wonder if he was real, if so I hope everything turned out alright for him. I have a Lee Mellon in my life, his name is Steve, things turned out alright for him, family and fishing trips and everything, good job Steve! we really need to catch up one of these days.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the sixties and seventies there were a variety of writers I and my friends read just for fun: Tom Robbins, Douglas Adams. Joseph Heller and Phillip Roth were also funny, but more seriously “literary.” Richard Brautigan wrote any number of fun and silly and inventive novels, usually filled with absurd similes and bizarre flights of thought and weird insights. This book, A Confederate General at Big Sur (1964) was his first novel and one of his best, though none of them pay too much attention to plot. He’s always going for the joke, with large doses of sex and drugs. I listened to it today as I ran and really liked it, laughing aloud a few times. Because I was smiling a lot more people seemed to say hi to me, so it’s all good!

So Big Sur (in northern California) turns out to be an outpost of the Confederacy, with a (possible) General there, and Brautigan comes back to this theme time and again, looking into the history of confederate generals and the military without saying anything really useful about them, but that’s not the point of the book. (I don’t know what the point is but I really don’t care; what I care about is the four main characters and their interactions, which are generally cannibis-oriented.

You can here get the flavor of what he is about in this book, early on in his career when his absurd imagination was just buzzing:

“Night was coming on in, borrowing the light. It had started out borrowing just a few cents worth of the light, but now it was borrowing thousands of dollars worth of the light every second. The light would soon be gone, the bank closed, the tellers unemployed, the bank president a suicide.”

“She had a voice that made Pearl Harbor seem like a lullaby.”

“I was of course reading Ecclesiastes at night in a very old Bible that had heavy pages. At first I read it over and over again every night, and then I read it once every night, and then I began reading just a few verses every night, and now I was just looking at the punctuation marks.

Actually I was counting them, a chapter every night. I was putting the number of punctuation marks down in a notebook, in neat columns. I called the notebook ‘The Punctuation Marks in Ecclesiastes.’ I thought it was a nice title. I was doing it as a kind of study in engineering.”

“Yes, “I farted.

“Were you going to the store?” she lied.

“. . . she opened her purse which was like a small autumn field and near the fallen branches of an old apple tree, she found her keys.”

“The way he lit a cigar was like an act of history.”

So it’s surrealism or absurdism with a beat/hippie bent. Humor, flights of fancy, dreams, hallucinations. Bees living in hives made of liver. Bears dressed in nightgowns. Whisky-drinking geese. Men in debt have the shadows of giant birds attached to them.

“This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That's what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.”

Here's a couple Brautigan poems that get at his mischievous nature, his way of poking fun at Literature, and then, his sweetness:

A piece of green pepper
fell
off the wooden salad bowl:
so what?


Oh, Marcia,
I want your long blonde beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harpsicord.
I want high school report cards
to look like this:

Playing with Gentle Glass Things
A

Computer Magic
A

Writing Letters to Those You Love
A

Finding out about Fish
A

Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty
A+


Oh, and I write this on Easter at what might be close to the peak of the pandemic in Chicago, with artists painting murals everywhere and 60 shootings in five days and people sewing masks. Happy Easter, everyone, whether you are a Christian or not.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was only through a Lee-of-another-color, Lee Mellon, that I found out the truth about Big Sur. Lee Mellon who is the battle flags and the drums of this book. Lee Mellon: a Confederate general in ruins.

Early in this novel our narrator and Lee Mellon visit a library. Mellon is a proud direct descendant of a famous Confederate general, and he wants to prove his claim to fame to his new friend by showing him a volume of Civil War history detailing the facts of great-grandfather Augustus Mellon’s service to the great Southern cause. They consult the tome Generals in Gray, Augustus Mellon doesn’t exist. Lee Mellon is frantic. How is this possible? His entire existence has been created on this source of pride, his lineage, his reason for being. His embarrassment is beyond the point of recovery.

The narrator attempts to calm him down, suggesting that perhaps Augustus Mellon was a famous colonel or captain. Lee Mellon won’t accept it. He requires this mistake, this fiction, to become a reality.

“Promise me till your dying day, you’ll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general,” Mellon said. “It’s the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!”

“I promise,” I said and it was a promise that I kept.

As a young lad in elementary school, the day I learned about the American Revolutionary War was the day I was told I was a direct descendant of a lieutenant that served under General Washington (paternal grandmother’s lineage). I recall going back to school that next day to declare this fact with a source of pride. As the years rolled on my father’s side of the family mentioned this fact at family reunions, Veteran Day celebrations, non sequitur declarations. As an adult I received a package containing a very detailed Dice family lineage. At the top of the page that began my grandmother’s story, Joseph Anthony’s lieutenant status is prominently displayed:



When my daughter was born in 2005 I decided to register her as a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. I went to the website to print the forms, get the info on Joseph Anthony, and I was stunned. Anthony wasn’t a lieutenant. He didn’t even serve in the militia. He gave an oath of allegiance and material aid.



When I made this fact known to my father, it didn’t register. When I explained this to my aunts, they smiled at me with sadness in their eyes, like I had just said “There is no God.” Then there came the time, a year or two later, when the inevitable happened: a family member mentioned Joseph Anthony as a lieutenant in the War and I piped up that it wasn’t true. We had proof from more than one publication that he never served under Washington. But they refused to believe facts. Their truth was more important.

Lee Mellon lives in a madcap world where his truth isn’t reliant on facts. He will lead the narrator, the reader, through a zany series of events, some hilarious, some crushingly sad and hopeless, but they all exist in a Lee Mellon bubble that attempts to keep the world at bay. When the world does enter that bubble, it’s in for a wild ride as it witnesses the results of a "general in ruin".

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

After trout fishing with Rich from a while back, and a collection of poetry and short stories in the last couple of weeks, along with this short novel now, I'm starting to think Brautigan deserves to be mixing it with my favourite writers. I absolutely loved this to bits! Told with a nice easy-going prose which is littered with some terrific homour, the narrator Jesse and his new buddy Lee Mellon made for such great company as they hang out, find love, get belly ache on a diet of muscatel wine and dodgy mackerel, throw rocks at some annoying frogs in a pond (before a couple of alligators do the trick), befriend a guy who ends up covering his sports car with chopped down trees as he tries to avoid the law, and bask at the sight of the Pacific from a hillside cabin (which must be the most surreal cabin I've come across). The significance of the Civil War is always close by, but I'll remember this for the great 60s Californian bromance of Jesse and Lee. Not a novel with any real plot, but the outlandish nature and bizarre occurrences here are so masterfully done, along with its upbeat tone which genuinely put a big smile on my face. As for the ending, well—he gives us five endings out of a possible 186,000 per second! For me, Brautigan easily puts Kerouac in the shade. He felt like that eccentric uncle you'd stay with at the weekend and never want to leave.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently discovered that almost all of Richard Brautigan’s books are included with my Audible membership, so I might gradually work my way through those works of his I haven’t already read. I decided to start with his first published book from 1965, (although it wasn’t the first one he wrote).

The narrator, Jesse, meets a fellow deadbeat called Lee Mellon, who in many ways becomes dominant in the narrative that follows. He’s always addressed as or described using both names, except by one character who calls him “amigo Mellon”. Lee Mellon tells Jesse that he is the great-grandson of a Confederate general called Augustus Mellon. Jesse says he knows of a book in the library that has a brief bio of every Confederate general, but when they check the book, there’s no record of Lee Mellon’s great-grandfather, which makes Lee Mellon very angry.

At this point I wondered whether the book would have a kind of truth v. myth theme, but it didn’t seem to progress like that. After a period of living in crappy rented rooms in San Francisco, Jesse and Lee Mellon end up living in cabins in Big Sur. They have no electricity and only have money sporadically. When they do get money they spend it on getting drunk, getting high, and getting laid, preferably all at once. That’s kind of it really, although Brautigan also brings in a story imagining Augustus Mellon in the Civil War – as a private soldier. I’m not sure if the imaginary Augustus is meant to be an alter ego of Lee Mellon.

The book is therefore a sort of pen-picture of the lives of marginalised 60s dropouts. On the plus side it can be quite funny. At times the humour is a bit cruel for my taste, but there were other scenes that gave me some lol moments.

I think there’s a part in all of us that wouldn’t mind living in a cabin in Big Sur.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black Lebanese Hash Tag

Set in the Big Sur of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, "Confederate General" isn’t Beat, nor is it Hippy in the clichéd collective, counter-cultural sense that we’re all familiar with from the mid- to late-60’s. It’s something in between, something genuinely individualistic, something unique to the participants, whether or not millions of others would subsequently try to replicate their experience.

Having abandoned San Francisco with no job and no money, Jesse and Lee retreat to a cabin in the forest, above the beach but beside a pond populated by noisy frogs, the only remedy for which is two juvenile alligators that are expressly acquired for that purpose.

They’re joined by two young women, Elizabeth and Elaine, and so begins something definitively naïve, unconventional, marijuana-fuelled, cosmic, Zen, charming, amusing, existential, stoned, immaculate and sexual.

Younger than Vonnegut, Brautigan’s worldview (as revealed in this novel) wasn’t shaped by his response to the bombing of Dresden or the subsequent experience of the horror of Vietnam (even if it harkens back to the romanticism and futility of the American Civil War).

There is something more carefree, loving, innocent and benign in this short, sharp, absurdist fiction that was the precursor of more long-winded exponents like John Irving and Tom Robbins.

It is as if Walt Whitman’s idealism, exuberance and optimism were parachuted into a 1964 version of Thoreau’s Walden, enhanced by a bag of dope found stashed away in the chimney. Mortgage-burdened Saturday groovers and connoisseurs of Trainspotting and Ecstasy will no doubt find this novel quaint.

For me, it recalls with pristine perfection a night in 1974 on a cane farm atop Noosa hill, with a full moon illuminating the two meter surf below, patiently waiting for us to enjoy the product of the valley of Baalbek that evening and return to its embrace at sunrise the following morning.


Sentences That Might Delight Some and Confound Others [In Honor of B.R. Myers, the Prince of Snark]

"From time to time I would get the desire to confuse my senses by watching large flat people crawl back and forth across a huge piece of light, like worms in the intestinal track of a tornado."

Brautigan's description of going to the movies.

"We've dug the holes deep enough, but the posts are a little too long."

The sort of problem you encounter when you try to build a cabin after consuming three bottles of gin.

"If so much as one more bite of abalone were balanced in my mouth, I knew that my soul would slide out like toothpaste and be diminished for all time in the universe."

I suppose another way of saying it would be that hunger eats the soul and repetition kills your appetite.

"The truck looked just like [an American] Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times."

This is just pretty typical of Brautigan's sense of humor.

"I held a sip of the cold martini in my mouth until the temperature of the drink was the same temperature as my body."

We all do it.

"...we went away with each other like small republics to join the United Nations."

A boy and a girl do something grown up with each other for the first time.

"She didn't have any clothes on and the sight of her butt renewed my faith in evolution."

I'll speculate that the gender of the subject and the object doesn't matter. We have all felt like this at some stage in our lives, as we sat back in bed.

"The stars did late things in the sky and were fastened by picture wire above our future."

This one would be enhanced by drugs.

"Elizabeth acted like an infinite swan."

What can I say?

"I like the way they crack like eggs against the Grand Grill of North America."

...waves crash against cliffs and pebbled shores

"She pulled [her jeans] down slowly, floated them down her hips like statues coming down a river on rafts."

This sensation cannot be captured by a mere photograph.

"The flies were teaching an advanced seminar in philosophy as they crawled up the crack of my ass."

Summer. Sex on the beach. Flies.

Any reader can make a sentence look ridiculous out of context. In context, an apparently ridiculous sentence might be either profound or hilarious or poetry.

Thank you, Mr Brautigan, for sentences that some might find ridiculous.


SOUNDTRACK:

The Thrills - "Big Sur"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1fGNC...

Cosmic Rough Riders - "Revolution (in the Summertime)"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpS9gy...

Song starts at 0:30.

The Stands - "Here She Comes Again"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLVIfI...

The Stands - "When This River Rolls Over You"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfurBT...

Florence + The Machine - "Cosmic Love"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EIeUl...

The Doors - "The Wasp (Texas Radio and The Big Beat)"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgssdC...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=traU_F...

"Live with us in forests of azure.
Out here on the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned - immaculate."

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought maybe I could give this three stars, but then all of my other three star books would be looking at me like I did them wrong. Consider this a high two star book.

If I had read this book when I was 18 and bored as a freshman in college I would have enjoyed it more, I might have thought that something great was being produced here. Now though I don't feel like anything great is being produced, I feel like I'm being forced to sit down and listen to people I used to know talk about things that they don't really know much about. Most of these people were hippie types and burnt out stoners. This whole book has that adolescent, hedonistic / 'i know everything because i get high all the time' thing going on that is so terribly boring.

Every so often there is a line, or a short chapter that is quite good, but then the good is erased by another line of 'quirky' dialog that doesn't seem to go anywhere except to be weird.

I don't know much about Brautigan. So I don't know if this is true, but this feels too much like the beats and their look how cool me and my friends are. Great, I get it, your cool and weird and different, now produce something that has something more to offer than weird and cool.

But am I not taking this into the historical context, where acting like immature alcoholic, stoners with no real regard for the consequences of one actions and having the empathy for others of an overly selfish four year old was something that was 'revolutionary'? Whatever. The characters in this book who are escaping from the square world, or whatever you want to call it are just more representations of that world, corporate greed, the rat race, whatever you want to call it, the emptiness of bourgeois life, name it what you will; it's just the same shit that's being played out here, a 'counter-culture' frat party, the unrestrained pleasure seeking that makes places like Las Vegas ultimate vacation destinations. Applauding and deifying a parasitic style of existence without any responsibility. In other words hippie culture with it's self-congratulatory trappings and delusions.

Does Brautigan get better than this?

[Arash · Rating 3 out of 5]

_

گاهی وقت ها اینطور است . نه هیچ صحبتی از آینده است و نه کوچک ترین درکی از آنچه گذشته
_
کتاب راجع به شخصی به‌نام لی ملون است اما کلا درباره دو مردی است که از زندگی شهری خسته شده‌اند و با فقر و نداری پناه می‌برند به یک جای پرتی، به خانه‌باغی کنار یک بزرگراه در بیگ‌سور. آن‌جا هر دویشان به اضمحلال می‌رسند. شخصیت لی ملون بسیار جالب است. برای هر کاری آداب خودش دارد.
جنگ جنگ است، فرقی نمیکند داخلی باشد یا خارجی. هرکدام آثاری جبران ناپذیر برجای خواهند گذاشت.
اولین تجربه نویسندگی براتیگان در بیست و هشت سالگی، در مقام قیاس شاید این کتاب متفاوت تر از دیگر آثار وی باشد ولی اگر خواننده کتابهای دیگرش بوده باشید ساختار نوشتاری براتیگان که درواقع همان بدون ساختار بودن است در این کتاب مشهود است. طنزهای خاص و لحن ویژه او وجه تمایز براتیگان است. بسیار دیده ام که این کتاب را به عنوان نسخه ای ضعیفتر از صید قزل آلا در آمریکا نام می برند، ولی این کجا و آن کجا.
در انتها، اگر اولین بار است از براتیگان می خوانید سمت این کتاب نیایید و پیشنهاد بهتر، کتاب در رؤیای بابل، که من فوق العاده آن کتاب را دوست می دارم است، اگر هم که براتیگان می خوانید و خوانده اید، این کتاب را هم بخوانید تا با دنیای عجیب و منحصر به فرد براتیگان بیشتر آشنا شوید

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

“He died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn't quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America. Poor devil. I heard it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.”

It's a funny thing to reach the end of a short novel that has thoroughly entertained and stimulated you from first to last and realise that you have nothing to say about it. It's early, the frogs kept me awake all night and I didn't have a single alligator on hand to show them who's the boss around these parts, Freud and Jung were duelling with pistols at dawn and my memory has been lost forever thanks to an non-existent ancestor who fought in the American civil war. That must be the reason, right?

I feel like a heel, this is after all the straightest and most narratively complete work of Brautigan's I have yet to experience, it deserves a glowing valediction to inspire others to (re)discover its genius but the pressure is clearly too much for me. It's wildly funny and packed with his trademark inventive metaphors despite being his first published work. I find his association with the so-called "beat generation" to be the impetus for misplaced assumptions about his work and this trip with him to that fabled hallowed turf of Kerouac et al when removed from period literary criticism quick to slap a label on things (sound familiar?) should tear down those fallacies once and for all. This Confederate General shares more with Steinbeck's Cannery Row vignettes and Vonnegut in terms of style, quality and stinging observations of Modern Times than any hippie trippy counter culture movement and perhaps I read what I wanted to in to it but surely he couldn't get away with so openly criticising the fools and their aimless drifting to Big Sur cabins as he does here and remain popular?

[TK421 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have enjoyed Richard Brautigan's strange style of storytelling in the past, but it doesn't work for me in A CONFEDERATE GENERAL FROM BIG SUR. I still like the fact that he used strange metaphors and similes for his descriptions, but this novel is a mess. It reminds me of what I would do as a teenager when I came home from football or baseball practice starving. I would find whatever leftovers there were and mix them in a bowl. Sometimes the combinations didn’t work so well. Sometimes they did. BIG SUR tries too hard to combine some pretty important themes of the 60s: freedom, escape (from society and self), renewal, and free love all together in a “coherent” story. The novel is narrated by Jesse, long time friend of Lee Mellon. Lee thinks that his grandfather was really a general in the Civil War and enlists the help of Jesse to find more information about this subject. At the beginning, I approached this as a quest type of novel. I was excited to see what type of commentary Brautigan would have about race relations and equality as he brought his characters through the 60s landscape of California. But the novel quickly veers from this thread, to one of free love, drinking, dope, and revolution. It wasn’t that the entertainment level diminished with these disjointed storylines, it didn’t…but, and here is where I think Brautigan’s style gets in the way of his storytelling, I stopped caring about the story. The more I read the more I realized that Brautigan had no idea where he was taking his story. Basically, I only finished the book because I was having fun with how Brautigan described things. Granted, this was Brautigan’s first novel, so the mistakes are forgivable, mostly.

RECOMMENDED (as a nice way to escape into a playground of language and images)

[Mat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man, I just like this Brautigan guy more and more!

A Confederate General from Big Sur was Brautigan's first published novel (although he wrote Trout Fishing in America before this one) and you can see why. It is full of youthful innocence and simplicity and Lee Mellon and the narrator Jesse (the two protagonists) live the lives of two typical young bachelors. This is also a fairly straightforward story, nothing too surreal about it (except for Brautigan's classic indelible and inimitable metaphoric language) and therefore this makes the book more...dare I say...'commercial' than his other works? Nothing wrong in that. Everyone has to start somewhere and this definitely put Brautigan somewhere on the huge literature market map, even if he started off as a tiny dot on the radar.

The story is about Lee Mellon who swears his grandfather was a confederate general in the Civil War who hailed from Big Sur but the record books say otherwise. Mellon himself kind of turns into a modern-day 'anti-general' who fights his own war against society by escaping from it, as so many people, especially back then, in the 50s and 60s were eager to do. A certain withdrawal from society when it longer makes sense or when you no longer feel like you belong there. This can all be traced back to Thoreau who really is not only the inspiration for Gandhi but for the dharma bums as well. Jesse (essentially Brautigan's character) just comes along for the wild ride of girls, dope and other shenanigans including purchasing a couple of crocodiles to get rid of the noisy frogs.

The book also had a beautiful ending, or should I say endings. It was very artistically done. I love the economy in Brautigan's writing. He always knows where to stop and not overflow or overburden his sentences too much with floweriness. This shows that he had a keen inner sense of how to write in a captivating way to the audience. This book, at many stages, was also very very funny. At times I felt that this is how Tom Robbins would have written in the 60s except that Brautigan is much funnier in my opinion.

I loved, absolutely loved In Watermelon Sugar which is his surreal masterpiece but Confederate General from Big Sur, is a completely different kettle of fish (certainly not trout though!), while not as original or creative as In Watermelon Sugar it by no means will disappoint, showcasing some of Brautigan's best (albeit early) writing. In short, this is his best conventional novel. Highly, highly recommended.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eternal novel. Brautigan’s second, our gain. Absurdity with great heart and bathos. I first read this more than a quarter-century ago, and I likely appreciate it more now (inverse goes for Lawn, but whothefuckamI?)
Brautigan was the Twain AND Steinbeck of my youth. Thank God for good drugs and better men.

(Personal aside: when I finally did make it to Big Sur for the first time around 18/19, I was delighted to find that Brautigan fictionalized very little about that magical, arboreal starburst straight up the coast from me.)

[Koala · Rating 5 out of 5]

این کتاب هم تموم شد.
ژنرال جنوبی اهل بیگ‌سور !

کاش یه کتابی شبیه این پیدا میکردم و میخوندم. به اینجور کتاب ها میگم "غروب جمعه" . نه که دلتنگی داشته باشه، اصلا! غروب جمعه برای من دلتنگی نمیاره فکر کنم چهارشنبه یا دوشنبه غروب‌هاش دلگیر تره. نمیدونم جمعه بود یا نه ولی یه غروب جمعه ای نشستم و یه کتابی شبیه این کتاب رو خوندم که نمیدونم چه کتابی هست. مطمئن هم نیستم که غروب بود یا نه بیشتر شبیه کله ی ظهر بود.

[Behdad Ahmadi · Rating 3 out of 5]

اولین رمان براتیگان.

درباره جس و لی ملون، و چند روز از زندگیشون در بیگ سور. لی ملونی که قسم می خوره یکی از اجدادش، یک ژنرال جنوبی بوده؛ هرچند که هیچ نام و نشانی ازش در کتاب های تاریخ نیست.

از یک نظر بسیار جالب بود، که طلوع براتیگان رو به وضوح میشد توی کتاب دید. می شد خمیر مایه ی خام تمام شاهکارهای براتیگان رو توی این کتاب پیدا کرد، و دید که اون سبک منحصر به فرد و اون دیدگاه عجیب، از کجا شروع شده و به کجا رفته.
دیدن ریشه ها، بسیار جذاب بود برام.

اما خود داستان چنگی به دل نمی زد. بعضی جاها خیلی خوب، بعضی جاها حتا بد. اما یک شروع عالی و یک پایان عالی، معمولن تجربه ی خوبی از خوندن یک کتاب برای آدم باقی میذاره. براتیگانی بود، اما خام و ناظریف.

پ.ن) ترجمه هر چند که روونه و خطای اساسی نداره، اما می تونست بسیار بهتر باشه.

[Theo Logos · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first of Brautigan’s published novels, A Confederate General From Big Sur was actually written after
Trout Fishing In America. It was published first because it was viewed as being more marketable, having something closer to traditional plot and character development. It lacks much of the experimental, wild slipstream magic of Trout Fishing In America, but still possesses Brautigan’s sly sense of outrageous humor. It made me laugh, but I missed Brautigan’s more surrealistic flights of fancy.

[Rod · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe not five stars, but easily a solid four and a half. No plot to speak of and no clean resolution at the end, but I knew to expect that from Brautigan going in. Oh, and of course it has virtually nothing to do with Confederate generals or the Civil War, except maybe tangentially, but I knew to expect that going in as well. Brautigan, though, gotta love him--at least I do. Similar in feel to Trout Fishing in America (loosely structured tales of down-at-the-heels counterculture types), but more traditionally structured (for Brautigan), its protagonists are the the narrator, Jesse, and his buddy Lee Mellon, who is convinced that he is the descendant of a Confederate general who hailed from Big Sur in California and who has been lost to history. In a nutshell, the two hole up in a cabin in Big Sur next to a pond, buy cheap wine by the gallon, try to get laid, scare the shit out of teenagers trying to steal their gas, try to get a few seconds' reprieve from the deafening din of the croaking of the thousands of frogs inhabiting the pond by throwing a rock and yelling something (Lee discovers that "Campbell's Soup!" works best), buy a couple of alligators, get laid (with girls, not the alligators), tie a crazy insurance salesman to a log, and so on. It's all good fun, I laughed a lot, but it also contains some of Brautigan's best writing. Right up there with Trout Fishing and In Watermelon Sugar in my book.

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The books of Francis Scott Fitzgerald are in my library, those of Brautigan on my night table." said Djian, a French writer.

An editor proposes in only one volume 3 novels. The occasion is beautiful to read again this brilliant writer.

Emblematic author of the beatnick period, He is the most underestimated.
Brautigan is the king of irony. His characters are splendid losers, celestial tramps. Lee Mellon claims to have a sudist general asancestor. Truth or false? It doesn't matter. Important is what Brautigan's carachters live. They are free. He likes them. He describes their life of wandering and combines. By his empathy, the most banal event takes on a mythological dimension.

And the style also is free. Short chapters. He had influenced everyone. An account of the American Civil War which intercalate and no end or rather 6 ends and why not 36000. No importance. We are far from the formalism of the bestseller.

Brautigan, a monument.

[Zuberino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious adventures of Lee Mellon and Jesse, two deadbeats on the Pacific coast. Brautigan has a fine way with words - all loosey-goosey charm and deadpan zingers.

It's interesting how many of these West Coast books I've been reading lately - Carver, McCoy, Steinbeck, Bukowski. They all catch a certain mood - a rejection of the prevailing ethos, a turning away from the American Dream. Brautigan can stand tall with any of them.

[Farjam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jesse narrates two stories. The main plot takes place in 1957 and focuses primarily on his friend Lee Mellon. In the first part, Jesse talks about how they met each other and became neighbours for a while. Later on, Lee Mellon moved out and went back to Big Sur. They start to write letters. Their letters and replies made a whole chapter. Finally, Lee Mellon persuades Jesse to go and live in his cabin for a while. In the second part of the story, Jesse accepts his offer and travelled to Big Sur. Lee and Jesse were just as miserable as C. Card's main character in Dreaming of Babylon. Every day, they struggle to feed themselves:
“I knew that if I ate abalone again I would die. If so much as one more bite of abalone were balanced in my mouth, I knew that my soul would slide out like toothpaste and be diminished for all time in the universe.”
But they make the most of their lives by spending time with their girlfriends, Lee's friend Johnston Wade, and alligators. Some parts of the story are sketchy and bizarre, possibly because the narrator was drunk and high at the time. Overall, It is a quirky and entertaining read.

The side story is about Augustus Mellon, a civil war general, his story appears in the early chapters and then as italicised paragraphs in the later chapters. Lee Melon claimed his great-grandfather was a Confederate general, even though no evidence of a general with that name from Big Sur could be found in library records.

Brautigan portrays people and places masterfully using as few words as possible he transports you to another world and reveals scenery and characters without boring you with unnecessary details. You have the impression that you are intimately acquainted with the character.
I'm sure you've encountered a writer who describes a character's face and clothing in minute detail and goes on and on about her personality, but she remains a stranger to you. As a writer, Brautigan is the polar opposite of them.

Throughout the story, Brautigan constantly shifts gears and surprises you with his novel ideas. He wrote it in 1961, and some of his artistic concepts are still influential: five different endings, another story with italic font and changes in narration style just to name a few. And don’t forget his sense of humour:
“Lee Mellon didn’t have any Southern accent. ‘You don’t have much of a Southern accent,’ I said.
‘That’s right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,’ Lee Mellon said.
I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway, I couldn’t argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers.”

[Vanya Hrynkiv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Одна з найкращих книг цьогоріч для мене; дебютна книга від останнього з бітників.

Ця книга відчувається як щось написане Воннеґутом, мені особисто нагадало "Колиску для кішки" своїми короткими розділами, але за рівнем абсурбу більше схоже на "Буфонаду". Книга настільки абсурдна, що після її закінчення йде додаткове: "Друге закінчення", "Третє закінчення"... і закінчень там штук 5 і ще "186 000 закінчень на секунду".
Обов'язково читатиму "Ловлю форелі в Америці" автора.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would have loved this book reading it in college in the 70s. But I give it 2 stars as I got bored with it quickly and was glad it was only 160 pages long.
There were some funny bits, but I have to admit that I did not care for the guy killing frogs and that turned me off on the entire book.
It was just plain boring to read about people getting stoned now that cannabis is legal (in my state, anyway).
Still, I'd like to give Brautigan another chance as I understand his "Trout Fishing in America" is supposed to be his best book. Or I can read more Vonnegut...

[Hákon Gunnarsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrator, Jesse, befriends a older eccentric called Lee Mellon, who thinks he is the descendant of the only confederate general from Big Sur. Jesse moves to Mellon's ramshackle place on the coast at Big Sur. What follows is a chaotic existence full of frogs, women, drugs, guns, lack of money, crocodiles etc.

This was Brautigan's first published novel, but his more famous Trout Fishing in America was actually written earlier. It was published in 1965, and to certain extend it really feels its age. It is especially in the way he portrays gays which is very much in line with older cliches.

But it is quite funny at times. It's not my favourite Brautigan novel, but its redeeming feature is the familiar humour. Brautigan had this odd sense of humour that I like quite well. This humour that is build up by mixing poetry, and fiction into this unusual concoction that Brautigan was so good at. So even though it is rather old fashion in many ways, and quite possibly with parts that are offensive to some, I did like this read. Not sure if I'm going to read it again though.

[Юра Мельник · Rating 5 out of 5]

На рідкість якісний дебютний роман. Бротіган очевидно глибоко осягнув новелістичність Джойса, відвертість Міллера, дитячість Селінджера, а подекуди навіть сатиричність Сола Беллоу і Геллера. Однак всупереч цьому автор витримав неповторний стиль, якому, очевидно, заздрять і яким захоплюються.
Для мене "Генерал конфедерації з Біг-Сура" це однозначно роман виховання. Роман який увібрав у себе всю Америку поза екранів телевізорів і фабрики популярної культури. Роман про безіменних героїв конфедерації, які народились не в той час і не в тому місці. Героїв, які приречені блукати наймальовничішими місцями своєї уяви, на тлі брудних автострад Каліфорнії.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

I simply love Brautigan's prose and poetry. He was so immensely talented. Along with the vivid imagery and the legendary wit he conveyed so effortlessly, he also has an eye for history and a gift for capturing the zeitgeist. In this case Big Sur and San Francisco in 1960.

You know those great authors and poets that all wrote so convincingly and vividly about life in California: Gary Snyder, Don Carpenter, Joan Didion, and Hunter Thompson. Well for my money - Brautigan also deserves a place in this pantheon.

[Bud Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We got the groceries and took them through the hole in the kitchen wall. The cats darted into the bushes like books into a library. It would take them a little while but hunger would return them to us like the classics: Hamlet, Winesburg, Ohio.”

Guy was a genius.

[Mike W · Rating 2 out of 5]

This may have been funny in its time. That time has passed.

[Jacob Pickering-Esquibel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can read this book every day cuz it just that wonderful.

[Amene · Rating 4 out of 5]

ریچارد براتیگان نابغه است.(به نظر من)
ترجمه و خوانش صوتی این اثر واقعا عالی بود.

روایتی هجوآلود و تمثیلی از ترکیب زندگی نکبتی که فرقی نداره قرن ۱۹ باشه و جنگ داخلی یا دهه ی ۶۰ میلادی.
آدم‌هایی که هیچ کجا ی تاریخ ثبت نشده‌اند،روایتی از آدم‌هایی تباه که در کنار تمساح‌ها جان می‌‌کَنند تا زنده بماند.
زنانی که از فرط ناچاری
چندماه درسال روسپی می‌شوند تا شکم بچه‌هایی که پدرشان در جنگ مرده را سیر کنند.
هجوی به روانشناسی و روانکاوی،انگ چسباندن به هر انسان متفاوتی در دوره‌ی رشد آمریکا.
تاثیر شوک الکتریکی و غیره.
همه و همه در روایتی سیال و شیرین و گاهی کمدی،داستان را برایمان رقم می‌زند.