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by Robert Thomson?
Richard Brautigan never does the same thing twice. In 20 years of writing novels, short stories and poetry, he has found as many styles to write in as he has found worlds to write about. He takes on language and reality as a child approaches new toys, always tinkering, always experimenting.
In the early 1960s, he chronicled the adventures in Big Sur of the rebellious "descendent" of a fictitious Civil War general. Later he created a harmonious, but somehow horrifying world made largely of watermelon sugar. In the late 1970s, he established his own version of the hard-boiled detective.
About the only thing Brautigan has managed to do consistantly in two decades is to turn the ordinary into a strange new experience. His toying continues in his latest work, The Tokyo-Montana Express, but the action is speeded up.
There are 130 stops on this mental train ride through the American and Japanese landscapes. Some of the stations are a few pages long, others no larger than a paragraph.
One hundred thirty stops isn't a very good record for an express, and the technique of defining that many scenes or events in a few lines has its limitations. An image seen through the express train's windows may just become clear as the train lurches from the station and heads for the next stop.
Other times, we'll be hooked on the landscape and the people we've met and want to settle down for at least a few chapters when the author calls us back aboard.
The first stop in his book is for a look at the diary of one Joseph Francl? during the musician-turned-pioneer's western travels in the late 19th century.
"I find the breaks in his diary very beautiful like long poetic pauses where you can hear the innocence of eternity."
Life on the Brautigan express is an effort to capture that type of innocent adventure. Through the author's stops — the equivalent of brief entries in a diary — we become aware of ourselves as life-travelers. The passenger disembarks, not with the travelogue reader's well-developed remembrances of places and names, but rather with a new taste for life's adventure and a fear that we can't really control the speed and path of our own express train.
Oakland Tribune?
January 11, 1981, Calendar Section: I-10.
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