در قند هندوانه
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didn't like it it was ok liked it really liked it it was amazing
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در قند هندوانه

4.08 of 5 stars 4.08  ·  rating details  ·  2,879 ratings  ·  238 reviews
In Watermelon Sugar is a surreal tale of a small community organized around a central gathering house which is named "iDEATH". In this environment, many things are made of watermelon sugar — the inhabitants also use pine wood and stone for building material. The landscape of the novel is always changing. Each day has a different colored sun which creates differen...more
Published 2007 by نشر چشمه (first published 1968)
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oriana
I can't believe I forgot how dazzling this book is. In Watermelon Sugar is 138 pages long — many of which are half pages at best — and yet manages to whip up a stunning, strange, surreal (I hate that word normally, but for serious), incredible little world, full of sad, strange characters and shockingly beautiful images.

It's the simplest little story: two lovers, a scorned ex-girlfriend, an old-timer who lights the lanterns on the bridges, a chef who cooks nothing but carrots. The w...more
Dawn
Softly we are Richard Brautigan and we have nothing to do with hippies and we fish for trout and keep some of the trout in there because we are Richard and we like to look at them. It suits us to have this mustache and to touch it periodically like one might touch a butterfly sitting there and wipe the crumbs away from something special that we have just eaten and enjoyed.
Travis
This is hands down my favorite book of all time. I wish I could give it more stars than five. It's written by a beat poet but sometimes feels more like Science Fiction crossed with stream of consciousness.
The first line of the book "In Watermelon Sugar, the deeds were done and done again, as my life is done in Watermelon Sugar." sets the mood of the book.
You're never really sure if it's all happening on Earth but in a different time or just in the mind of the author. ...more
Brent Legault
Brent Legault rated it 1 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommends it for: pies in the skies, candyland lovers
This is the book that made me realize that Brautigan was a sham writer. I had my suspicions after reading Revenge of the Lawn and Trout Fishing in America, but this one put him forever in my private slush pile. I don't understand the reputation that has been handed him and I don't think he deserves it for the folderal he manufactured. His poetry is all right, at least I remember The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster as not entirely without worth. Some of it makes me laugh at least. But hi...more
K.D.
K.D. rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommended to K.D. by: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006-2010)
Shelves: 1001-core, favorites
Remarkable imagination. At times funny yet dark overall. Poetic yet simple lines. One of the two books that I am planning to re-read again and again.

Richard Brautigan (1935-1984), born in Tacoma, Washington, wrote this novella only for around 60 days in 1964, the year I was born. However, this was only published in 1968. In Watermelon Sugar was his 3rd novel after he earlier got noticed with his first, A Confederate General From Big Sur and got catapulted to international fame with h...more
Kat
Kat rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommends it for: ideath inhabitants
I was absolutely besotted with this book and now I can't remember why, but I carried it around with me in high school and just thumbed through it and soaked it up. I suppose it was everything I wanted, but couldn't have - freedom on all levels for a small-town girl stuck in a small school full of small people. This was my mantra for escape and it opened up many doors - some good and some bad, but all leading to the same right place and that was my own mind and my own opinions. For that alone, I ...more
Jonas
Jonas rated it 4 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommends it for: the blissfully ignorent
A short book with short chapters and is therefore perfect for the crapper. But the story isn't shitty at all. Being my first Braughtigan read, i expect fun things ahead.

The book depicts what turn out to be a very crutial few days in the zany hamlet of iDEATH. The inhabitants that live about this place are an ignorant lot who at first seem quite whimsical, floating around in a utopian society, but as you learn more about them the story of their destiny unravels this perception. ...more
Melody
1/2012 This one is a touchstone for me, and I'm not sure exactly why. Perhaps because it is so very gentle, so loving, so open. Ostensibly, it's a few days in a commune in some mythical world that used to have beautiful, man-eating, talking tigers. A world where everything is made from watermelon sugar. But it's always struck me as a meditation on the art of the possible. It helps me to remember how to live, in the words of Annie Dillard, "yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of ...more
Lisbeth Solberg
The 4-star rating is a compromise between different readings at different times of my life. Once I even loved this book, a sort of hippie fairytale, in which unpleasant possessiveness and alcohol abuse (bad) poison pleasant promiscuity and marijuana use (good). This was my favorite part:

We went over and lay upon her bed. I took her dress off. She had nothing on underneath. We did that for a while. Then I got up and took off my overalls and lay back down beside her.

That'...more
Aricle
I have read this book many times, starting from when I was a kid. It enchanted me as a kid for it has themes that I could grasp: your parents leaving you and being scared, talking tigers, best friends and lost friends, mountains of junk and mysterious places to explore, not to mention the fascination of different colours of the sun for every day of the week. As I have read it again and again, the layers of meaning and understanding have grown. I am glad that I read it first when I was very young...more
Amy McGuire
This book is so pretty, it's in a world of its own, and that world is a magical one. It's the kind of book that requires little effort, it just carries it along with you, you become submersed in it. It's a book based on little things, not the big picture, where the people float around with no higher purpose than to simply live in their wonderful watermelon based world.

Nothing in this little world of watermelon sugar ever quite seems complete, nothing ever happens, the world just goes...more
Ayeh
Ayeh rated it 5 of 5 stars
یک ساعت یا بیشتر پیش از طلوع خورشید از خواب بلند شدیم و صبحانه را پیش از موعد خوردیم . امروز وقتی خورشید در آستانه ی دنیایمان بالا بیاید , تاریکی باز می ماند و صدایی بر نمی آید . صداهامان از بین می روند . اگر چیزی بر زمین بیندازی هیچ صدایی بر نخواهد خواست . رودخانه ها هم ساکت اند .
James Taintor
I tried to read this as a teenager, and put it down midway through, unable to find anything to really hook my attention onto. I can't understand how. It's a real work of art, with an almost stultifyingly simple narrative woven through a world that is simultaneously so ambiguous, so sinister, and so rich with symbol that the whole thing seems prismatic, with every event and every memory simultaneously pastoral and apocalyptic, comforting and nauseating.

Talking tigers. Whiskey made ...more
Anna O'connell
This is one of my favorite books of all time. It is about a commune (although the word commune is never used and the story is not about the act of being a part of a commune but rather the goings on within one) and the characters that inhabit it. In the commune, there is one 'living room' type area called iDeath, which is where all of the characters meet and eat together. The book is written in first person, and in a manner which makes it seem as if every aspect is entirely true (for example...more
Katie Parker
Some time ago, I read that this 137-page novella was the inspiration for Neko Case’s song “Margaret vs. Pauline” (which just happens to be the first song I taught myself to play on the guitar), and I knew I had to read it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to find it anywhere until a few months ago, when I finally came across it in Barnes & Noble as part of a three-book compilation. At this time I still didn’t like reading non-Kindle books, and so it sat on my bookshelf, taunting me with its simple...more
Ben Loory
Ben Loory rated it 5 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommended to Ben by: Jonathan
this should really be 4.5 stars because i think the very last page is wrong... or stops just a second shy of where it should. i'm still hanging there, waiting for what must necessarily follow........ right? right, richard? right?

in any case, this is a pretty great book. it's brautigan poem-world in the guise of some kind of post-apocalyptic hippie nightmare-fantasyland. takes a little while to adjust to it, it kinda just throws you in, and the adjustment period is a little traumatic,...more
Quinn
Wow! There are so many ways that you could interpret this book. My interpretation, which could be totally wrong and off base, is that the narrator sees life as kind of a hopeless bowl that we all get lost in. A sort of melancholy mess with one certainty: Death. We are all going to die that is certain, some go through life happily and merrily while others seem bitter, angry and lonely. In my interpretation, "ideath" represents the certainty of death even in a somewhat seemingly pe...more
A.J.
This is one of Brautigan's rather slight efforts, a product of its times that would be unlikely to find a publisher today, or, indeed, tomorrow. It did just fine, though, in the middle 60s.

The narrator inhabits a place called watermelon sugar, where watermelon sugar is itself one of three essential building materials. Watermelon sugar seems also to be a state of mind. He lives in a shack and takes his meals at iDEATH, which appears to be a commune; one of its malcontents, inBOIL, has l...more
Rasoul ashtary
تو قند هندوانه، اشکان در عین خوشحالی و شور و شعفی که از عشق اش به یه دختر اثیری داره، خودش رو با چاقو سلاخی می کنه، در قتد هندوانه، سید رضا وقتی از سر کار اش نزدیکای اتوبان بعثت با مترو داشته به خونه بر می گشته، یه دختر فال فروش لاغر مردنی رو میبینه که چند تا لاشخور اونور تر رو صندلی ای مترو نشستند منتظر اند بیفته بمیره، برند جسد اش رو بردارند،برا همین دوربین اش رو در میاره ، عکس میندازه، اما بعد تر عذاب وجدان میگیره، فندک می گیره رو ریش هاش ، دود میشه میره هوا. تو قند هندوانه، حمید حبیب الله، ب...more
Elliott
In Watermelon Sugar is a sad, lonely novel with beautiful imagery. The nameless narrator tells of his life in the town of iDeath, which is a place like no other and not just because the sun shines a different color every day, and about his relationship with two different women Margaret and Pauline. They are what inspired the Neko Case song "Margaret vs. Pauline" off her album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. Using deceptively simple prose, Richard Brautigan presents a world that is n...more
Abby
I return to this book a lot. Recently, I think I offended a friend by being nosy about their previous name before they legally changed it. I read this chapter and mulled over my mistake:

MY NAME

I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.
If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you di...more
Erica
It is a very odd book; often when reading it I would be thinking "What the...?" Throughout I was somewhat puzzled by the world in which they lived, some questions were answered while others were now. Was this a small isolated commune, the way the entire world was, or an example of post apocalyptic survival? I have also wondered if the tigers were tigers as we know them or just another group of people.

This is a book that is thought provoking and leaves you wondering...an exc...more
Dan
I had heard this was a novel utterly bizarre, experimental, and totally removed from reality -- which I guess it is, in general -- but really, I would call it more of a ferry-tale than an assault on traditional narrative. The protagonist is writer "without a normal name" who lives in a world where everyday the sun rises a different color and where the dead are buried in glass coffins along riverbottoms and glow at night to be admired by lovers passing hand-in-hand over bridges made of...more
Debbie Ding
one just gets the sense that the person who wrote it had to be someone really beautiful but a little naive or mad too, and then that someone got horribly lost along the way, and only got home after everyone else dear to him had died of old age, leaving him to die alone with the terrible heartach, so he fed himself to the tigers in the zoo.
Patricia
I read most of this book on an airplane. I don't really like to talk to people on the plane, so I wasn't disappointed when my seatmate didn't acknowledge my presence as I sat down. Then, about midway through the flight, he leaned over to me and said, "That's a really strange book." To my horror, I realized he was reading OVER MY SHOULDER! I agreed with him that it was strange and quickly went back to reading. A few minutes later, he commented again, even quoting part of the page I was ...more
Artnoose Noose
Artnoose Noose rated it 4 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition
Recommends it for: anyone
Recommended to Artnoose by: Pittsburgh Dystopian Science Fiction Club
This was an interesting pick for the Pittsburgh Dystopian Science Fiction book club, in that, it was only obliquely dystopian. In fact, it would probably not even qualify as dystopian by some definitions. It does take place in a society heavily controlled by convention and an interesting aspect of the weather affecting the city's watermelon agriculture.

For most of the characters in the book--- almost all of them really, including the protagonist--- this is a communalist utopia. Every...more
Dustin Reade
Tigers, a grand old trout, bridges and buildings built out of watermelon sugar, The Tombs, and the Forgotten Works. All of these things are used as tools by Richard Brautigan to construct a world out of watermelon sugar. This book is strange, haunting, and surreal. THings are mentioned throughout the book that never get explained, but instead of feeling hollow, they actually help to round out the strange world of iDeath and inBoil. Brautigan seems to understand that most people do not have a com...more
David
I'm ashamed to admit that my only previous knowledge of Richard Brautigan was his poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which is frequently cited in useless debates about cyber-utopianism. But then comes my little sister carrying a hardcopy library book of his collected writings and going on about how he's the greatest thing since zucchini bread. That my be a stretch, but he sure is a fun literary companion before bedtime. "In Watermelon Sugar" is pure fantasy and a quick ...more
Jeannie
I liked this so much, even though I didnt really get his writing. There's beautiful imagery, at the very least. It's a quick read, so I'd recommend it to anyone and would love to hear what anyone has to say about Brautigan's story.
Emma Keesing
This is one of the most unique reading experiences I have had to date.
I knew as soon as I saw the title of this book, that I had fallen in love.
The world of iDeath, the characters who reside there and their experiences are not so far removed from our own. The treatment of the relationships between our protagonist, and his past and present lovers were engaging. Just the right level of cynicism and genuity.
I thought of it as a place, not unlike our own, but compacted and submitte...more
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اطلاعات 1 7 May 18, 2008 11:35pm  
In Watermelon Sugar (Paperback)
In Watermelon Sugar (Paperback)
In Watermelon Sugar/در قند هندوانه (Paperback)
در قندِ هندوانه (Paperback)
In Watermelon Sugar (paperback)

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Richard Brautigan was a 20th century American writer. His novels and stories often have to do with black comedy, parody, satire, and Zen Buddhism. He is probably best known for his novel Trout Fishing in America. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1984.
More about Richard Brautigan...
Trout Fishing in America / The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar Trout Fishing in America The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1966 Revenge of the Lawn / The Abortion / So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

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“In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.” 36 people liked it
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