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In Watermelon Sugar

4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 · rating details · 4,839 ratings · 328 reviews

iDEATH is a place where the sun shines a different colour every day and where people travel to the length of their dreams. Rejecting the violence and hate of the old gang at the Forgotten Works, they lead gentle lives in watermelon sugar. In this book, Richard Brautigan discovers and expresses the mood of a new generation.

Paperback, 144 pages

Published July 4th 2002 by Vintage Classics (first published June 14th 1968)

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Oct 16, 2010 K.D. Oliveros rated it 4 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 his second, T...more

16 likes · like · see review

Aug 28, 2009 oriana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2009, perennialfavorites

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 whole book ta...more

18 likes · like · see review

Jun 08, 2008 Dawn rated it 5 of 5 stars

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.

19 likes · like · see review

Mar 27, 2007 Travis rated it 5 of 5 stars

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. The sun shines a different...more

13 likes · like · see review

Dec 12, 2011 Brent Legault rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: pies in the skies, candyland lovers

Shelves: regrets-i-ve-had-a-few

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

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Mar 16, 2013 Jr Bacdayan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. “In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.”

This is quite probably the strangest book I've ever read. Richard Brautigan's wunderkind of novel is set in bizarre and zany world. A world where almost everything is made of Watermelon Sugar, where the sun shines a different color each day and the stars are all red. A world where tigers can talk to humans, even teach Arithmetic. A world of forgotten things, vegetable statues, one-inch rivers and sta...more “In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.”

This is quite probably the strangest book I've ever read. Richard Brautigan's wunderkind of novel is set in bizarre and zany world. A world where almost everything is made of Watermelon Sugar, where the sun shines a different color each day and the stars are all red. A world where tigers can talk to humans, even teach Arithmetic. A world of forgotten things, vegetable statues, one-inch rivers and staring trouts. A world that's so out of this world. Brautigan writes it in a very simple, very basic prose, something even 10 year-olds could understand. He peppers it with seriousness about strange things and mindless dialogue that results in a very potent mix for a comedy. I had quite a few laughs. Now, the trouble with this book is if you take it literally, and people easily fall for that, when they do, this can be treated as a piece of hippie-junk. Don't fall for that, because the underlying meaning, the metaphors and ironies are so mischievously crafted to ignore. The name iDeath, the mass-suicide done by inBOIL and his evil gang, Margaret hanging herself on an apple tree. All these are gelled by something I can't explain, something I think I quite know but quite don't. It's like Deja vu. It's like the protagonist's name. It makes me feel like I understand the book, but when I try to dig deeper, I'm at a loss of words.

“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 did not know the answer.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was raining very hard.
That is my name.
Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong—“Sorry for the mistake,”—and you had to do something else.
That is my name.
Perhaps it was a game you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.
That is my name.
Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.
That is my name.
Perhaps you stared into a river. There as something near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.
That is my name.”

In watermelon sugar is the allegory of those things we don't understand. Why we love, why we fall out of love, why people kill themselves, why we live. The story is strange, yes, but then again, isn't our world? How is In Watermelon Sugar different from reality? The specifics maybe, but the stranger world is really the one we live in. At least, they all get to dance. (less)

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Dec 29, 2007 Kat rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: ideath inhabitants

Shelves: absolute-guilty-pleasures, the-good-old-days-regained

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

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Jul 26, 2012 Jeffrey May rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this more than once between 1970 and 1980. It stuck with me so much that I could recite the opening paragraph easily and did so over the years. Recently, I read it again on Kindle. Still, truly a strange and wonderful piece of literature. This time through I was struck by the violence and blood of the ending chapters, perhaps made more palatable upon first reading by the poetic nature of Brautigan's prose.

Richard Brautigan inspired my own early writing. At 24 (I’m now 58), I wrote Cynthia...more

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May 21, 2011 Abby Hagler rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, poetry, short-fiction, read-in-2011

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 did not know the answer.
That is my...more

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Nov 13, 2007 Jonas rated it 4 of 5 stars 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.

For someone who e...more 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.

For someone who enjoys knowledge and reading books and stuff of the like, the main character who is supposedly the commune's resident writer seems like quite the deadbeat, choosing to instead spend his time avoiding an old flame, persuing a new one, taking long walks at night and reflecting on a past of unfinished artistic business. The he, who doesn't even have a name, totes a reputation of writing an intersting story when he was in grade school and because of this is the local man for the job to write the first book of his generation. The town doesn't seem to mind this as most of their jobs are childish at best: cooking, cleaning and chasing birds out of the watermelon patch which supplies the town with a majority of their supplies. One could say that they have it all, but there is no diversity at hand; it's a circular lifestyle with no begining and no end. So the writer saunters around the society completely happy with not finishing anything he begins.

Later there are characters introduced who have grown tired of this juvenile lifestyle. Lead by the crude inBOIL, they instead choose to spend their time drinking themselves into oblivion and contemplating the meaning of the society they hate and have banished themselves from. Their habitation is by the nearby "forgotten works", a diverse collection of items from a world that is probably more like ours. It's a land bigger than the imagination of any particular iDEATH resident and thus is avoided by most. Although natural, artistic and beautiful, iDEATH seems much less facinating than these mysterious forgotten lands. Margaret, the former love of the protagonist, is also intreged, but chooses not to escape her unfufilling lifestyle in an alcoholic binge, but to only taste the wares of history found in the forgotten works and to also relish in the security of iDEATH.

When the novel comes to climax you find the inBOIL crew rolling into town hoisting above them the society's true meaning. In a theatric suicidal display they enact the very name of the hamlet before the very eyes of its citizens. Margaret soon follows. The book then concludes itself perfectly: without a formal ending.

This is a trivial and enjoyable book full of colours, agriculture, sadly-mathed tigers and silly characters. It hardly tells a story of any substance but instead causes the reader to mentally review the little details over and over again until a sufficient meaning can be derived. Good is good and all, but if it's self indulgent, passive and ignorent, it's better to be evil. And if you're going to be evil, you might as well go out with the same kind of bang if you're trapped in the same sort of loop. (less)

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Jan 17, 2012 Melody rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: comfort-read, favorites

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 singl...more

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Apr 19, 2008 Lisbeth Solberg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nostalgia, twice-read-and-more

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's a fairly representative...more

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Apr 24, 2007 Aricle rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourites

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

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Aug 09, 2009 Amy McGuire rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 around in l...more

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May 19, 2008 Ayeh rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 .

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Mar 19, 2013 Hortense rated it 4 of 5 stars

Why I like him: He was a total idiot, frugal, courteous, with an easily breakable heart. Seemingly un-censoring, he populated his nice new white pages with as few words as imaginable. He sometimes included very engaging photographs. His books are still thin. The Tijuana, Mexico abortion romance is probably my favorite. He looked like he wandered down the Coast from the Olympic Mountains or somewhere (Takoma, actually) with rain in his hair. But anyone who moves about the Pacific Northwest for ab...more

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Sep 23, 2012 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: end-of-world-dystopian-apocalyptic

Bizarre and surreal pretty much sums this up and I know many people see this as utopian, a Garden of Eden setting in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world. Brautigan indicated that Bolinas, the town in California where he lived for a while, provided something of a template. It is notoriously reclusive and the abode of poets, artists and ecologists.
The commune is called iDEATH and the narrator has a shack nearby and a room in the commune. There;s his girlfriend Pauline, an ex-girlfriend Marg...more

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Aug 18, 2012 Keith rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of my professors insisted this past spring that I wrote like Brautigan, and needed to read him, and since I hadn't ever heard of him and had trouble remembering his name, she lent me her lipstick-stained copy of The Hawkline Monster, which I greatly enjoyed. Having never read Brautigan before, it made sense to me that she'd recommended him -- Hawkline is a Weird Western without any of the usual trappings of the Weird West, which was the kind of writing I'd been handing in for review that qua...more

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Dec 20, 2011 James Taintor rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

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 out of forgotte...more

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Aug 27, 2011 Anna O'connell rated it 5 of 5 stars

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, Br...more

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Apr 03, 2011 Katie Parker rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

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 si...more 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 black-and-white cover (obviously not the one above). I finally picked it up after all this time, and I’m so glad, though I just realized today that it was released for the Kindle in July!

Published in 1968, the book is told in the first person by an unnamed man (“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 did not know the answer. That is my name”) who lives at iDEATH, a sort of commune where almost everything is made from watermelon sugar and the sun is a different color each day of the week. The story probably takes place in a sort of post-apocalyptic world, where the remnants of the old world are kept in huge piles called the Forgotten Works that go on for miles. The world described in the book seems like a beautiful place, filled with lanterns that are lit each night (with watermelontrout oil) and buildings erected around the trees and rivers (“There must be two or three hundred rivers here”). I couldn’t possibly explain it and do it justice, so here are some passages I liked:

“In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here are you are distant.”

“I can walk across the bridge hundreds of times without stepping on that board, but Margaret always steps on it.”

“Fred went out the door. He crossed the bridge without stepping on that board Margaret always steps on and couldn’t miss if the bridge were seven miles wide.”

“Pauline and I went into the living room and sat down on a couch in the grove of trees by the big pile of rocks. There were lanterns all around us.”

“Today would be a day of gray watermelons. I like best tomorrow: the black, soundless watermelon days. When you cut them they make no noise, and taste very sweet. They are very good for making things that have no sound. I remember there was a man who used to make clocks from the black, soundless watermelons and his clocks were silent.”

“I spent half an hour or so pacing back and forth on the bridge, but I did not once find that board that Margaret always steps on, that board she could not miss if all the bridges in the world were put together, formed into one single bridge, she’d step on that board.”

I won’t ruin any more, but I will say that this short book was exactly what I expected, and more. In terms of tone and language, it seems quite characteristic of the 60s, and even though it’s short (I basically finished it in one sitting), it has a lot of substance. Jealousy, rivalry, death and tigers who know their multiplication tables? This story has it all. Highly recommended to those looking for a quick but meaningful read with beautiful imagery. Plus, Brautigan is from Washington State, so he gets some major points for that.(less)

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Dec 31, 2009 Ben Loory rated it 5 of 5 stars

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, what with i...more

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Dec 06, 2009 Quinn rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009-books

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 perfect communal s...more 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 perfect communal society, "the narrator" represents the melancholy and hopefulness of life, "Inboil" represents anger and frustration in the world and "Margaret" represents hopelessness and despair in a seemingly perfect world. I feel that Brautigan had a special meaning for the "forgotten works". To me it represented two things: First; the worldly things we place value in mean nothing after we die, they have lost their value and are forgotten, tossed away with no meaning. Two; it represents people and their memories after death we are all eventually forgotten. Brautigan also mentions several times that there is an erected statue of a person that nobody remembers that the tigers killed. The “forgotten works” and the “statue” represent the lives of people and memories forgotten, junk. With these representations I feel that Brautigan himself was afraid that after his own death he would be forgotten, that in the end we are all forgotten. It gives question to that old adage: What is the meaning of life and what is it’s purpose. I feel that Brautigan was giving us a glimpse that things on the inside are not always as they appear on the outside. I find it ironic that Brautigan himself, who we assume to be more like “the narrator”, committed suicide much like the character of "Margaret" just a few years after publishing this story.

I found this story very thought provoking and I am still thinking about it and its meaning. I could write a whole paper on this book and what it represents to me.
(less)

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Dec 06, 2009 A.J. added it

Shelves: fiction, literary

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 left and no...more 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 left and now lives near the Forgotten Works; he will return to set an example through suicide, which apparently fails to make much impact on his former friends at iDEATH. And there are a lot of trout.

Brautigan is doing many of the same things that he did in Trout Fishing in America. He's come up with a nonsense phrase, "in watermelon sugar," which he repeats until it suggests all kinds of values, as does "trout fishing in America." But unlike Trout Fishing in America, this narrative is basically linear and unsurprising, and not in the least funny. It suffers, above all, from a signal failure to be interesting. The writing, furthermore, is generally mundane; this is definitely not Brautigan at his best.

Maybe the only interesting thing here is the question of how the book views communal living. The members of iDEATH all seem to be quite happy, living their simple lives in which not very much happens. But they also seem to pass their lives in a curiously anaesthetized state: they are unconcerned by the gruesome deaths of inBOIL and his gang, and Margaret's brother reacts to her suicide by saying, simply, "It's for the best. She had a broken heart." Perhaps only Margaret, who shares inBOIL's interest in forgotten things, is capable of suffering a broken heart. Her former friends react to her death by bricking up her room, filled with forgotten things, according to their custom. They're unemotional and ahistorical, and do what thou wilt is the whole of their law. Although this book is viewed as a hippie tract, it seems perhaps to be more skeptical of its times than one might expect.

But all this does not excuse it. This slim, slight volume is an artifact of its times, and a clear indication of why Brautigan has been written off as a flash in the 1960s' cultural pan.(less)

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Jul 26, 2011 Elliott rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 normal and odd...more

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Nov 21, 2011 Erica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1001

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 excellent alternative to...more

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Dec 29, 2012 Arnost Stedry rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Jsou knihy, které vás musí zasáhnout v pravý čas, ale pak je jejich ničivá síla drtivá. Zároveň existují knihy, jejichž explozivitu umocní až ilustrátor, který přeštípne správný drátek. Důvodně se domnívám, že Melounový cukr je výsostný příklad obou těchto jevů. Hipízácká poetika a zároveň nezamýšlené a tak palčivé paralely s životem v pozdním socialismu v pokročilém stádiu progresivni paralýzy z ní vyrobily těžko dostupný a freneticky vyhledávaný klenot dozdobený suverenními Šalamounovými ilust...more

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Jan 21, 2010 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 watermelon...more

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May 27, 2012 R. Ellis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not for everyone. Watermelon Sugar has Brautigan's usual focus on love and death, and is perhaps even a tad gorier in places than usual.

However, the book intrigued me with its wrappings. Here we have a setting that appears to be post-apocalyptic, much like Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home. Brautigan's choice of names of places and characters could have been taken from David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus (or as a futuristic dream of Apple marketing); e. g. iDEATH and inBOIL. And somewhat like L...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Joey Brockert rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a weird story. It was published in the Sixties, so maybe it is a product of its time. The setting seems to be New England, in a commune. There is some notion of a town nearby, but the people of the story live together, sort of. The narrator lives in a shack by himself so he can do the writing he wants to do. He goes to a place called iDEATH to eat with the others. I wonder if the 'I' that Apple uses was borrowed from this book? He has a girlfriend who comes to stay with him and another...more

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About Richard Brautigan

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.

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Trout Fishing in America / The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar

The Abortion: An Historical Romance, 1966

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Quotes from In Watermelon Sugar

“I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.” — 62 people liked it

“In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.” — 56 people liked it

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46182.In_Watermelon_Sugar?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1170315302l/46182.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46182.In_Watermelon_Sugar?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan[/url]

In Watermelon Sugar

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