Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan on 1976
Genres: Fiction
Pages: 187
Format: eBook
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Subtitled as a Japanese story, Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout is my second reading of the author’s work. It is a unique story, a peculiar one too, with themes that might seem bizarre at first but are actually brought to clarity as the plot moves forward
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The storyline is about a heartbroken American writer that starts a story (somewhat meta) about an ice-cold sombrero hat that falls from the sky and lands in the center of a small Southwest American town. This is where the bizarreness comes in. This scene is repeated in a different manner along those 187 pages. While the focus of the writer inside the story is on the hat he certainly tries different angles to find out why he wants to write about the sombrero falling from a sky. Along with that, we get insight into the recent events of his life. His Japanese has left him, and he is now trying to cope with the heartbreak. In order to cope, he is trying to western stories with an angle that seems pointless to him as the plot moves forward.
I cannot talk about the characterization in this novel. Because there is a single character whose imagination is the locus of this novel. It indeed is a sad tale but after reading it, I think is a perfect way to deal with broken relationships and the feeling of the void it leaves. The narrator of the novel, when searches for the lost totems of his girlfriend shows how longs for her. This is the turning point in the novel for me. It is written without any flaw and the narrative voice is important but it does not drive the plot forward. The series of real event and the events that unfold in the imagination of the novelist described in the novel drive the plot.
The book is loosely based on Brautigan’s life and the void he was left with. The perfect instability of novelist who is being considered a humorist by the society and national media, cannot be a pure work of imagination. It is a bittersweet piece of writing that one must explore.
4 out of 5
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