This is The Confederate Soldier from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan. I bought it on an afternoon trip to Olympia with Freddie, the one where we drove to Aberdeen after wards, listening to conservative talk radio the entire way, & stopped at Kurt Cobain’s first house, & the Star Wars store. The bookstore in Olympia was next to a burrito place with a bar attached. It was called Quality Burrito & it was a good burrito but not worth the nine dollars, which is a lot for a burrito. The book was in the “Beat Poets” section. It was wrapped in plastic & had a note indicating that it was second edition, above its price, as if to justify charging for it.
The narrator follows a wanderer throughout the bay of the 1960′s. The wanderer swears that his grandfather was a general in the civil war, & the narrator constructs a lengthy metaphor in which our hero is a confederate soldier fighting the culture war. Any past readers of Brautigan will recognize his simple, breezy, lyrical frankness. New readers will be pleasantly surprised as Brautigan maintains a refreshing levity throughout a melancholy work.
Weston Smith
