Today my lady, like she has so many times before, graciously brought home a backpack full of books (thank you, thank you!), just in time for my trip to DC tomorrow. The pile contains a number of exciting books, but one in particular has me feeling especially giddy. The book is Richard Brautigan's 1967 surrealist psychedelic American satire classic Trout Fishing in America.
One look at the cover (above) and I was in love.
It is a thin book printed in 1967 with the cover threatening to detach itself from the binding, slightly browned with pages that crinkle. It is NC State University's fourth copy.
I put the book in my queue after hearing the 5 minute segment on NPR's Weekend Edition, which included this piece:
The book "Trout Fishing in America" refuses to be a novel. There's no kind of consistent character development, or chronology or a plot, really. And it also refuses in a way to be a book. For example, the first chapter of "Trout Fishing in America" is a discussion of its own cover. It has a strange self-awareness of itself as a book.
And the other aspect that's very consistent is the sense of very bizarre comparisons. He talks about furniture that looks like baby food. And he talks about an old woman who tends a huge wood furnace like the captain of a submarine in a dark basement ocean during the winter. And some of the comparisons are quite moving and others are just plain bizarre. He describes the long bill of a woodcock that's like putting a fire hydrant into a pencil sharpener then pasting it onto a bird.
I cannot remember having so adored a book after 1.5 pages. Listen to how he describes the cover:
Born 1706—Died 1790, Benjamin Franklin stands on a pedestal that looks like a house containing stone furniture. He holds some papers in one hand and his hat in the other.
Then the statue speaks, saying in marble:
PRESENTED BY
H.D. COGSWELL
TO OUR
BOYS AND GIRLS
WHO WILL SOON
TAKE OUR PLACES
AND PASS ON.
Around the base of the statue are four words facing the directions of this world, to the east WELCOME, to the west WELCOME, to the north WELCOME, to the south WELCOME. Just behind the statue are three poplar trees, almost leafless except for the top branches. The statue stands in front of the middle of the tree. All around the grass is wet from the rains of early February.
