A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, the Hawkline Monster

by Richard Brautigan

Book Overview

Richard Brautigan was the author of ten novels, including a contemporary classic, Trout Fishing in America, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of stories.Here are three Brautigan novels--A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon and The Hawkline Monster--reissues in a one-volume omnibus edition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395547032
• ISBN13: 9780395547038
• Release Date: February 1991
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 608 Pages
• Weight: 1.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A marvelous trio of novels

"A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster" is a collection of three separate novels by Richard Brautigan. The three books are bound together in one volume with separate pagination. Together they demonstrate Brautigan to be a witty, wacky, and altogether remarkable writer.I actually found "Confederate General" to be the weakest of the three. This novel follows the misadventures of the impoverished narrator and his friend in California. It's a story, told with absurdist and satiric flourishes, of people on the fringes of society. I especially liked the narrator's unique approach to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes."Dreaming of Babylon" is a hilarious and delightful spoof of a hard-boiled detective novel. Brautigan's anti-hero, C. Card, is a poor, not-too-intelligent private eye working in San Francisco in 1942. Early in the book we learn that he is too poor to even afford bullets for his gun, and is hounded for rent by his landlady. His escape from this harried existence is an anachronistic fantasy life in ancient Babylon. This is a really fun book that effectively satirizes various popular entertainment genres. And despite being a lowlife, Card is a curiously appealing narrator.The third novel, "The Hawkline Monster," is a remarkable blend of horror, science fiction, western, and absurdist comedy. Taking place mainly in Oregon in 1902, the book follows the adventure of two assassins who are hired to kill the monster of the title. The book is full of quirky characters and bizarre situations. Brautigan creates genuine suspense, and his prose at its best is vivid and crisply poetic.Brautigan's work in this trio of novels reminds me at times of the writings of Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut. But despite certain similarities to these two, I believe that Brautigan is a unique voice, and his work is a wonderful addition to the tradition of American fiction.

Good enough to be subversive.

There is a comic genius at work in each of these three novels. The theme of Confederate General at Big Sur must be that we all have been acting like we believe we are descendents of some confederate general, even if a private who was always off stealing chickens or some Yankee's boots would be a more accurate description of our past. Dreaming of Babylon might be the ultimate description, in a detective story, of the results of American intelligence when applied to the question of left and right (whichever one happened to be pointing straight up in the air went click instead of boom). The Hawkline Monster has a college professor working in ice caves until he was turned into an elephant foot umbrella stand. This must be about cold war intellectuals, and it might even be safe to say that, now that the cold war is over, but the intellectuals are still here. Trust me, I am not giving too much away about these books. There are so many jokes packed into these novels that offering a rubric for understanding how anyone could write this stuff and still feed chickens in Montana with his household garbage, the corn cobs of which seemed like skylab to him when one landed on a chicken's head, should not be read as an attempt to impose any limitation that would keep people who know how this stuff goes from thinking that my opinions about this stuff could easily seem as clueless as the thoughts of the detective in Dreaming of Babylon after a major league baseball pitcher practiced throwing fast balls at his head.

A genius to be discovered again and again

The work that made me a real fan was "Dreaming of Babylon", the main character is Nana-Dirat, a wonderfool woman from Babylon. She exists only in the mind of a bad detective but she's more real than any other woman I have ever meat. I even dedicated one of my short novels to this beauty.Then reading all his novels, you discover that he's the master of the short novel. The greatest master ever. This man can say in 100 pages what Tolstoy said in 1,000. This is probably the greatest American novelist ever, because in many ways he invented a complete new path in literature many writers will discover in years to come and be influenced by it. Brautigan is a famous writer now, but his his place in American prose will probably grow.(And yes the wonderfool should be wonderful, but that's the point:-)

Three of Richard's Best

When I first read Hawkline Monster, the first Brautigan novel I came across, I was taken aback. I'd never read anything as interesting as this tale of two professional killers hired to kill a supposed monster. I became a fan. Confederate General, however, became my favorite. Brautigan takes his readers into another world--goes beyond simple experience in chapters like Lee Melon performing his rights of tobacco at Big Sur. With Dreaming of Babylon--a unique mystery--this is one of the best Brautigan collections around.