A place where one can overcome the traumatic scars of the past and build anew.
A place where simple work keeps those you love alive. Bridges with Janus-like heads (children and trout) crisscross the rivers that permeate the pine woods. Scattered amongst the shacks are sculptures of vegetables and important events in the community’s past. You can see the deathly inhabitants “lying there in their coffins, staring from beyond the glass doors” (92). The tombs of children shine forth “with pale lights coming up from the bottom of the river” (26). Brautigan’s prose adorns the local with vivid signifiers. In my view, iDEATH is one of the iconic SF places. In the distance under a sun with ever-changing colors the Forgotten Works, a vast/undefined dump or ruin of a pre-disaster city, reaches like distasteful mold further than anyone wants to travel (69). The story takes place in the community (commune?) of iDEATH with its 375 inhabitants, a common eating area, shacks around the perimeter, luminescent tombs along the bottom of a latticework of creeks, a trout hatchery, watermelon patches, and statues of vegetables. Brautigan juxtaposes the terrifying calamities of N’s past–including his memories of his parents consumed before his eyes by the human-like Tigers and the violent rhetoric and self-immolation of inBOIL–with N’s tender memories of his blossoming love for Pauline. More a sequence of short linked scenes, In Watermelon Sugar charts the memories of a nameless narrator (N) attempting to write a book about the community and inhabitants of iDEATH. Brautigan, best known as a Counterculture poet and the author of Trout Fishing in America (1967), spins a poetic thread simultaneously elegiac and nightmarish. Edmund Shea’s photograph for the 1969 editionĭesperate for something unlike any other New Wave SF experiment, I came across Richard Brautigan’s surreal post-catastrophe novel In Watermelon Sugar (1968).
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