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    A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster
    A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster
    A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster
    Ebook490 pages6 hours

    A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster

    By Richard Brautigan

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    This cult classic from the author of Trout Fishing in America “reads like a spaghetti Western crossed with Frankenstein, viewed through an opium haze” (The Sunday Times).
     
    The celebrated poet, novelist, and guru of the 1960s San Francisco literary scene, Richard Brautigan brings his highly original Gonzo style to this surreal parody Western. The time is 1902, the setting eastern Oregon. In the ice caves underneath Professor Hawkline’s house, a deadly monster lurks. It’s already turned the professor into an elephant foot umbrella stand, and now his two beautiful daughters have hired a pair of gunslingers to put a stop to the mayhem.
     
    But Hawkline Manor is full of curiosities and secrets, like the professor’s underground laboratory where his work on The Chemicals remains unfinished. And as the gunslingers pursue their peculiar quarry, they encounter monstrous mischief, amorous advances, and evil that is all too human.
     
    “Bursting with colour, humour and imagery, Brautigan’s virtuoso prose is rooted in his rural past.” —The Guardian
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 22, 2014
    ISBN9780547525563
    A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster
    Author

    Richard Brautigan

    Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) was a god of the counterculture and the author of ten novels, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of short stories.

    Read more from Richard Brautigan

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    Reviews for A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster

    3.5/5

    7 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A sad man spends some time off the grid with his dirtbag friend.2.5/4 (Okay).It's not surprising Brautigan wasn't more popular, given that this book was the world's introduction to him. The "story" relies heavily on tropes that had already been worn out by Beat writers by this time. And while his weird style of writing is there, it isn't used with any of the expressive power of his better works. Also, how can he use the Confederacy as his central metaphor without addressing racism? I know these characters are not supposed to be good people, but seriously, could he at least, like, mention that it exists?
    • 3/5
      Your opinion of A Confederate General from Big Sur could depend on how delighted you feel about its frequently odd descriptive phrasings. An example from near the end, when I finally admitted to myself that I had tired of this sort of thing: “the waves were breaking like ice cube trays out of a monk’s tooth or something like that. Who knows? I don’t know.”I don’t know either. And I have easy access to the Pacific’s surf to give it thought. As a teenager I would have loved that stuff—so different! Of course, if such prose makes you happy, A Confederate General will be enjoyable, breezy reading. Author Richard Brautigan has fun with his usually upbeat characters who, despite material shortcomings (see the “Tobacco Road” rite of Lee Mellon), find themselves situated in as beautiful a place as can be desired. If a menace hovers over them all, it’s the idea that they can’t always be as content as their present moments allow, at least if their lives continue along the same course. About this, hints appear toward the end.Some of my dissatisfactions with this short novel no doubt derive from anticipating that its main character would be a real or made-up live Confederate General. This isn’t exactly the case. Even so, I liked the book. It’s tempting to call it piffle but it’s better than that. Light, appealing, and friendly in tone (with some cruel exceptions apparently meant to be comic), it’s nice company while it lasts.
    • 5/5
      His first novel, more conventional than some that came after, an absolute delight.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful author I discovered too late. I should be rereading his books now and not for the first time. Tanked up on muscatel, the narrator and Lee Mellon check out the library for details of Mellon's Confederate general granddad. He wasn't a Confederate general - `the librarian was debating whether or not to call the police'.
    • 4/5
      He put the box down and took one of the alligators out. The alligator was stunned to realise that he was not in the pet shop. He looked around for the puppies that had been in a wire cage next to his aquarium. The puppies were gone. The alligator wondered where the puppies were. Lee Mellon was holding the alligator in his hands."Hello, alligator!" Lee Mellon shouted. The alligator was still looking for the puppies. Where had they gone?"You like frogs legs?" Lee Mellon shouted to the alligator and put the alligator carefully down into the pond. The alligator lay there stationary like a toy boat. Lee Mellon gave him a little push and the alligator sailed out into the pond.First published in 1964, Richard Brautigan's first novel is an early example of American counter-culture literature. Lee Mellon (who believes that one of his ancestor's was a Confederate general in the American Civil War), leaves San Francisco for a shack on the cliffs of Big Sur and Jesse (who narrates the story), soon follows him. They live from hand to mouth in a ramshackle hut with a ceiling so low that no-one can avoid banging their head, and persecuted by the noise of the frogs in the pond outside. Their downbeat but extremely funny adventures with girls, gasoline thieves, alligators and crazy businessman, while drinking copious amounts of beer and smoking dope, are punctuated every now and then with flights of fancy like the one quoted above.
    • 5/5
      I must say I was a little askance at the generally lukewarm to negative reviews on Brautigan. I wonder that if to appreciate him, you had to have been there. The sixties and seventies were a time of turmoil in America. Riots in inner cities and on college campuses were common. It looked like the country was falling apart. And in the midst of this is Richard Brautigan, writing calm personal books about relationships, about innocents trying to come of age. I never laughed so hard in my life at this book. It's perfect for reading aloud. Brautigan was kind of a counter-culture hero when he was writing. he became 'kind of' famous. His books started coming out in hardback. Then they stopped selling as widely. Brautigan becamse kind of a carcicature of himself, an aging hippy in a world that was finally moving on. He was an alcoholic. He never drove. He was the cliched introspective and tortured writer. He committed suicide. We lost a great writer. He would have done better.
    • 2/5
      A very different book. Narrator Jesse drops out and leaves San Francisco for a jobless and moneyless existence in the Big Sur of the early sixties with his ne'er-do-well friend Lee Mellon, a man who claims his ancestor was a general in the Confederate army.After making it through some tough times - little or no food, female companionship, or peace and quiet at night due to an evil frog army, their luck starts to change and a certain uneven beauty comes over their simple lives.Although the novel is set in the early sixties and seems to bridge the gap between the beat and hippie generations, there are many callbacks throughout to the civil war - a hundred years before - and the parallels between Lee Mellon and his ancestor are tenuous-to-nonexistant, almost to the point of being non-explicable (maybe they share the theme of being seen as something you are not?).This is the first of Brautigan's books I have read and was happy to find out this was not his best. If you like beat/hippie lit it is probably worth a read, but it just wasn't good enough to recommend to a general audience.
    • 4/5
      I have a soft spot for this book. I think it's the humour that got to me as much as anything else - a few neat turns of phrase and I'm anyone's. I especially like when the narrator runs into an old friend in the street and lies about never seeing him - to his face. I think that's how the joke goes.The story itself is brief and somewhat slight, the link to the civil war and the confederate general more ambiguous and tenuous than one would necessarily like, but I like the ending, which stretches of into infinity, and is happy.
    • 4/5
      Maybe not five stars, but easily a solid four and a half. No plot to speak of and no clean resolution at the end, but I knew to expect that from Brautigan going in. Oh, and of course it has virtually nothing to do with Confederate generals or the Civil War, except maybe tangentially, but I knew to expect that going in as well. Brautigan, though, gotta love him--at least I do. Similar in feel to Trout Fishing in America (loosely structured tales of down-at-the-heels counterculture types), but more traditionally structured (for Brautigan), its protagonists are the the narrator, Jesse, and his buddy Lee Mellon, who is convinced that he is the descendant of a Confederate general who hailed from Big Sur in California and who has been lost to history. In a nutshell, the two hole up in a cabin in Big Sur next to a pond, buy cheap wine by the gallon, try to get laid, scare the shit out of teenagers trying to steal their gas, try to get a few seconds' reprieve from the deafening din of the croaking of the thousands of frogs inhabiting the pond by throwing a rock and yelling something (Lee discovers that "Campbell's Soup!" works best), buy a couple of alligators, get laid (with girls, not the alligators), tie a crazy insurance salesman to a log, and so on. It's all good fun, I laughed a lot, but it also contains some the Brautigan's best writing. Right up there with Trout Fishing and In Watermelon Sugar in my book.
    • 4/5
      anoceandrowning summed it up perfectly. a second kiss.enjoyed it, but not his top work
    • 3/5
      Lowered my previous rating of four stars down to three. I liked it, but not nearly as much as I did the first time through so many years ago.

    Book preview

    A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster - Richard Brautigan

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