my name depends on you

another time, i will compare in watermelon sugar to if on a winter's night a traveler, but not today. today i dive into the ridiculousness of richard brautigan's beat fiction "novel," in watermelon sugar, without clouding or confusing (further) by addressing out the similarities on an theoretical level to italo calvino's play on the reader's role in the act of reading. (woah, that was a lot of prepositional phrases. sorry, won't happen again.)

this book is called in watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. is it just me, or could you totally go for a tall glass of kool-aid right about now? anywho. i love this book. it's another that will only take an hour or two to read, you time-starved/short-attention-spanned people. but i must warn you, it's certainly not for everyone. i can't tell you much about the plot due to my no spoilers policy, but here's what the publishers apparently thought it was about (from the back cover): 

   in watermelon sugar

   is a story

   of love and betrayal

   that takes place in

   an extraordinary environment 

   where the sun

   shines a different

   color every day.

huh? exactly. but let me just say that this book plays with your mind the way phantom tollbooth teased you when you were little. everything is made out of something called watermelon sugar. or trout. the characters live on a sort of commune. i guess. there's a love story, but it's not easily recognizable as such. there are bad guys, but really just in the way that the people who choose to live underground in demolition man are 'bad.' 

here's a fun tidbit from what could be considered chapter 3, called 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 name.

Perhaps it was raining very hard.

That is my name. 

awesome! i'm going to start introducing myself like that. there really is story and plenty of depth in this book; it's not just crazysauce to contemplate. that just makes it delicious. also, the tigers are good at math.


ok, last point, then i'll leave it up to you to read it and form your own opinions. many find this book frustrating because it's not clear what is "real." for instance, if you see something happen, dream the same thing, hear about it from someone else, what actually happened? does it matter? does it only matter what you believe happened? the concept of death has a great time in this story too. i'll leave it at that. 


if you've read it, or once the ambiguous 'you' have read it, i invite you to take a more academic look by trudging though the paper i wrote about reading between the lines of this fantabulous novel.