In this posthumously released novel, Richard Brautigan's voice--quipping, punning, strewn with non sequiturs--comes like a rattling of chains. Brautigan took his own life in 1984; An Unfortunate Woman was written in the years immediately preceding, and the writer's imminent death haunts the book. It bears the subtitle A Journey, and Brautigan means this quite literally. We follow the first-person narrator in his peregrinations from Montana to San Francisco to New York to Alaska to Honolulu and back to San Francisco, with a detour across the bay to Berkeley--and that's leaving out Canada altogether. Pulling him like a wispy thread throughout is the hanging death of a San Francisco housemate who had cancer. We never learn her story, just that his book's "main theme is an unfortunate woman." She's a constant glancing reference.

Brautigan uses a journal format, with digressions galore, to explore the contingency of his own existence. He tells of loves past, homes past, the kitchens of friends and the beds of strangers. But like the old free-lovin' hippie he is, he never commits to any single story. Of one fellow he meets in Ketchikan: "He is one of those people who in a normal book, unfortunately not this one, would be developed into a memorable character." The author is forever warning you of a digression ahead or a story he'll get back to later. His references to the book in progress read, in this rueful context, not so much as self-indulgent cuteness, but as a kind of sad knowledge of the unkempt ways of his own mind. An Unfortunate Woman will not bring Brautigan many new fans, but devoted readers will find the dark, self-revealing side of a man who felt middle age like a blow to the head. --Claire Dederer


From Publishers Weekly
Eerily foreshadowing the 1984 suicide of its author, counterculture legend Brautigan, this previously unpublished book is a semiautobiographical description of one man's experience of the classic symptoms of depression. The narrator, clearly the talented, alcoholic, sexually questing Brautigan, explains his rambling account as "a calendar of one man's journey during a few months of his life." The episodic entries, dating from January to June of 1982, at first seem whimsically random, as the narrator recounts a peripatetic six months wandering among Montana, Berkeley, Hawaii, San Francisco, Buffalo, the Midwest, Alaska, Canada and points in between, but soon it's obvious that a preoccupation with death is the dominant theme. The narrator stays at various times in the house of "an unfortunate woman" who hanged herself, and the event darkens his consciousness even when he is not physically there. Meanwhile, another friend is dying of cancer, and this, too, contributes to his morbid state of mind. Financial troubles, estrangement from his daughter, insomnia, a deepening dependence on drink and the confession that he feels "very terribly alone" add up to a picture of a man whose melancholy will reach the breaking point. Even so, Brautigan maintains his ironic humor and his ability to write clear, often crystalline prose, though at time his mannerismsArepetition of a pedestrian thought, a habit of attaching cosmic significance to a mundane event, such as an Alaskan crow eating a hot dog bunAbecome irritating. Yet the reader cannot help being moved by this candid cri de coeur of a soul in anguish, and to his fans, these last words will be a book to treasure. (June) a memoir written by Brautigan's daughter, reviewed in this issue's Nonfiction Forecasts. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In Brautigan's last unpublished novel, the protagonist faces one friend's cancer and another's suicide. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Etelka Lehoczky
Brautigan creates what he calls "a calendar of one man's journey during a few months in his life" that, though labeled as fiction by its publisher, reads like memoir.


USA Today
"I read it in one sitting - its only 110 pages - and felt the loss of this remarkable talent. His insights into life were incredible."


From Kirkus Reviews
A suicide victim in 1984 when he was just short of 50, the prolific Brautigan is best remembered for Trout Fishing in America and The Revenge of the Lawn (1971). Now comes an eccentric little novel finished in 1982--and this droll, gifted, brilliant writer comes to life all over again (also see p. 762). Imagine a writer (unnamed, but Brautigan to a tee) buying a 160-page notebook on his 47th birthday and then filling it up, sometimes daily, sometimes after long hiatuses, making of it a calendar of one man's journey during a few months of his life. This is Brautigan's plan, however imperfectly fulfilled--a plan simple indeed but one deepened considerably not only by a preface about a friend dead of cancer that same year but also by the fact of the largely itinerant narrator's living off and on during the year in a house where someone recently committed suicide--the title's unfortunate woman. But does Brautigan go straight to this subject of fear, despair, and death? Well, any who know Brautigan know that's never the way he goes, and here are deceptively lighthearted pages about a chicken in Hawaii, a drinking bout in Alaska, a pastry being eaten in California, an imaginary courtroom with a man on trial for not being able to remember what day it was when he last stopped writing, a tiny spider, in Montana, on a porch, settling in the hair of the writer's arm, aiming to make a tiny web there. Like Laurence Sterne, Brautigan is actually writing about something quite serious, but . . . in a roundabout way, and, like Whitman, he's writing about the greatest enormities as sensed in the smallest turnings of nature and of self. The book is about a man thinking, and if A terrible sadness is coming over me, as the narrator says toward the end, the sorrow is transformed for the reader into something ever durable, hopeful, and alive. A treasure. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"I read it in one sitting - its only 110 pages - and felt the loss of this remarkable talent. His insights into life were incredible."--USA Today

"The gravity-free movement of Brautigan's remarkable mind, the piercing comic insights, the deft evocation of the thoroughly marginal places are aching reminders of this most original writer." --Thomas McGuane

"Richard Brautigan's An Unfortunate Woman is not only vintage Brautigan but is among his best, filled with breathtaking insights about our life now." --Jim Harrison

"How fortunate we are to have another book by our friend Richard Brautigan, a man we all respected and loved." --Peter Fonda

FROM THE PUBLISHER

An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a traveler's journal, chronicling the protagonist's journey and his oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and the death from cancer of another, a close friend." "After Richard Brautigan committed suicide, his only child, Ianthe Brautigan, found among his possessions the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman. It had been completed more than a year earlier but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding it too painful to face his presence on page after page, she put the manuscript aside." "Years later, having completed a memoir about her father's life and death, Ianthe Brautigan reread An Unfortunate Woman and now, clear-eyed, she saw that it was Richard Brautigan's work at its best, and that it had to be published.

FROM THE CRITICS

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

Completed prior to his suicide, Brautigan's "wonderfully skewed and fascinatingly stylish" last novel explores the fragile, "grim," shadow land surrounding death, including oblique ruminations on the suicide of an acquaintance and the loss of a close friend to cancer. "Often off-the-wall and funny, his narrative wanders more than Vonnegut's." "Not a cheerful journey, more like a suicide note."

Library Journal

In Brautigan's last unpublished novel, the protagonist faces one friend's cancer and another's suicide. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Claxton - Time Out New York

With a series of marvelously choreographed digressions, the author shows that at the time of his death, he was not in artistic decline but instead was hitting a considerable stride.

Kirkus Reviews

A suicide victim in 1984 when he was just short of 50, the prolific Brautigan is best remembered for Trout Fishing in America and The Revenge of the Lawn (1971). Now comes an eccentric little novel finished in 1982—and this droll, gifted, brilliant writer comes to life all over again (also see p. 762). Imagine a writer (unnamed, but Brautigan to a tee) buying a 160-page notebook on his 47th birthday and then filling it up, sometimes daily, sometimes after long hiatuses, making of it "a calendar of one man's journey during a few months of his life." This is Brautigan's plan, however imperfectly fulfilled—a plan simple indeed but one deepened considerably not only by a preface about a friend dead of cancer that same year but also by the fact of the largely itinerant narrator's living off and on during the year in a house where someone recently committed suicide—the title's "unfortunate woman." But does Brautigan go straight to this subject of fear, despair, and death? Well, any who know Brautigan know that's never the way he goes, and here are deceptively lighthearted pages about a chicken in Hawaii, a drinking bout in Alaska, a pastry being eaten in California, an imaginary courtroom with a man on trial for not being able to remember what day it was when he last stopped writing, a tiny spider, in Montana, on a porch, settling in the hair of the writer's arm, aiming to make a tiny web there. Like Laurence Sterne, Brautigan is "actually writing about something quite serious, but . . . in a roundabout way," and, like Whitman, he's writing about the greatest enormities as sensed in the smallest turnings of nature andofself. The book is about a man thinking, and if "A terrible sadness is coming over me," as the narrator says toward the end, the sorrow is transformed for the reader into something ever durable, hopeful, and alive. A treasure.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Richard Brautigan's An Unfortunate Woman is not only vintage Brautigan but is among his best, filled with breathtaking insights about our life now.
 — Jim Harrison

How fortunate we are to have another book by our friend Richard Brautigan, a man we all respected and loved.
 — Peter Fonda