In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
In Watermelon Sugar is one of those books which you kind of get the charm of but simply can’t like. It’s tiny, with a chapter for every one or two pages, and is very easy to read, yet it took me some six months to finish. I see here on Goodreads I’m in the minority but I can easily see why someone could be taken with its simple prose, dreamy lack of narrative and the accordingly floaty characters who always live for the moment, nurtured in a unique, post-modernist culture.
I could find very little pleasure in this book. It’s not just that it’s so much stuck in the era it was written in; I got sick of trouts and that watermelon sugar stuff of which apparently everything is made in that peculiar world. The easy-going style I found pretentious and forced. What I found the most annoying though were the characters: they were wafer-thin, completely naive and perfectly interchangeable. Again, perhaps, that’s what’s made this book so famous and loved by so many. Obviously, I beg to differ.
I must admit it, though: the idea of having a sun the colour of which changes every day, and when it’s black the world has an extended night with no stars and everything is completely silent, tickles my Extraverted Intuition.
