An Unfortunate Woman by Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan was a fucking genius. Underrated and largely ignored in this country my girlfriend and I had to order most of his work second-hand from the states after we first read Sombrero Fallout and like Bukowski and Carver he doesn't seem to have written a bad story. Canongate have been bringing his work back into print for the last couple of years and a fucking good job they were doing until the atrocious new covers they inflicted on us last year. If you can try and pick up the older and much better visualised covers second hand please do so, or better still try and track down the original American covers (most feature the author posing with a girlfriend). If all that sounds like too much trouble just buy the books the first chance you get and ignore the covers - the writing is after all the most important thing and it's beautiful.

I won't be giving anything away by quoting from the very last page of the book but I will show something of Brautigan's offbeat wit and style:

"My thanks to the JMPC Company of Japan for printing this notebook and for the Kinokuniya bookstore in San Francisco for importing it. I also thank the Pilot Pen company of Japan for manufacturing two Pilot BP-S pens who were my two other companions on this calandar closed now like a door"

An Unfortunate Woman is in many ways typically Brautigan ; a maverick writing style coupled with a romantic view of a cynical world just makes you! feel sad as you smile. This one is more traumatic as it was his final work - the manuscript was actually found by his daughter still stained in blood after Brautigan took his own head off with a shotgun in 1984. It deals with two doomed women and a journal writer who remembers them and his own place in their lives. The writing is wonderful and the greatest loss is that it shows that Brautigan still had a lot to offer when he decided to kill himself. Does all this sound depressing? Trust me, it isn't - it is in fact very life affirming. If you want to read the best that Brautigan had to offer then check out Revenge of the Lawn Stories which I'm sure I'll mention elsewhere. If you haven't discovered this guy yet then you are in for a treat.

UK Paperback ISBN: 1841951463 ~ USA Hardback ISBN: B0000632J7