Summary
Richard Brautigan: In Watermelon Sugar Brautigan's third book In Watermelon Sugar directly follows on from his previous, most successful book, Trout Hunting in America (1967). Both Watermelon and Pastrva can be described as longer narratives with a somewhat clunky narrative line or, say, as a series of anecdotes broken into chapters, with a gallery of oddball characters busy with twisted activities in twisted environments... Namely, it is not at all easy to unequivocally state whether they are novels or short stories, or possibly novellas; in fact, the simplest thing to say is - it's Brautigan! Literary critics labeled him as the writer who best represents the countercultural movement of "peace, love and music" in the second half of the 1960s. Rock music and the lyrics of most of the musicians of that time (which on the cover are excellently duplicated by local musicians from Koprivnica), and even their way of life, "swim" with Brautigan's prose like trout in water. Let's also mention that his predecessors can be found in beat writers such as Burroughs, Kerouac or Ferlinghetti, who said of Brautigan that in his life and writing "he was more in tune with the trout in America than with the people". This quality of his, in the best sense of those words, is also impressively present in In Watermelon Sugar, where the sun shines a different color every day and where everything is made of watermelon sugar... Imaginative, dreamy, beautiful, ugly, cheerful, sad, elusive, poetic, wacky, completely atypical, and so typical of Brautigan!
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