So the Wind Won’t Blow it All Away – Richard Brautigan

Condition : Good.

First British edition, Jonathan Cape, 1983, Hardcover – Fiction – 131 pp.

Taken with the recently discovered An Unfortunate Woman these two late Brautigan novels are a fitting epitaph to a complex, contradictory and often misunderstood genius.

So the Wind Won’t Blow it all Away is a beautifully written, brooding gem of a novel – set in the Pacific Northwest region of Oregon where Brautigan spent most of his childhood. Through the eyes, ears and voice of Brautigan’s youthful protagonist the reader is gently led into a small-town tale where the narrator accidentally shoots dead his best friend with a gun. The novel deals with the repercussions of this tragedy and its recurring theme of ‘What if…’ fuels anguish, regret and self-blame as well as some darkly comic passages of bitter-sweet romance and despair.

Poetic, gently eccentric and deeply poignant, the story is a fitting swan-song for his life. * The Times *

Life is taken back to bare essentials in his books, never more so than here but life is never so rich. If someone ever made a movie of this, good people would watch it a hundred times and never tire of it. * Beat Scene *

The verbal humour and zany charm of the book remain quite irresistible. * Daily Telegraph *

Brautigan gets you drunk on similes, knocks you out with exquisite turns of phrase and leaves you with an ending that hits the entire novel out of the ballpark … Amazing. * Uncut *