Revenge of the Lawn is Richard Brautigan in miniature and contains no fewer than 62 ultra-short stories set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the flower-powered San Francisco of the late fifties and early sixties. In their compacted form, which ranges…
Revenge of the Lawn is Richard Brautigan in miniature and contains no fewer than 62 ultra-short stories set mainly in Tacoma, Washington (where the author grew up) and in the flower-powered San Francisco of the late fifties and early sixties. to FinlandQuantity: 1 availablepaperback. Condition: Good. Shows some light wear from age and use. Interior is good with sound binding and no marks, damage or labels.
Brautigan’s collection is described as a sequence of tiny fictions, sketches, and prose-poems that together map a sensibility: a Western coast empathy, a beat-zen playfulness, and a stubborn tenderness toward ordinary lives. This is not traditional narrative; it is a gallery of moments, glinting with surreal humor and shrewd observation.
In “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” a man replaces all the plumbing in his house for poetry, with disastrous results. In “The Old Bus,” the humdrum of daily transit becomes a mirror for larger longings. In “The Need For Gardens,” a group buries a lion in a hole that proves too small-an emblem of vast desire meeting stubborn reality. These pieces demonstrate Brautigan’s knack for bending ordinary scenes into strange, luminous vignettes.
The book’s landscapes span Tacoma’s intimate neighborhoods to San Francisco’s sensory overload, where the Pacific breeze and urban oddities mingle with memory and dream. Brautigan’s language is deceptively simple, yet it can hold fierce lyricism and sly humor in the same breath. The pieces are often as short as a single line or paragraph, yet their impact can linger, like a momentary spark that refuses to fade.
The collection is frequently described as a bridge between Beat sensibilities and post-60s whimsy, a blend that recognizes both the grind of ordinary life and the possibility that language can transmute it. Some readers hear echoes of Baudelaire in Brautigan’s playful melancholy and attribute the work to a radio dial that flickers between tenderness and absurdity. Others note the book’s almost haiku-like compression, where a few phrases give rise to a larger resonance.
Readers often highlight favorite entries such as “Homage to the San Francisco YMCA,” with its audacious plumbing metaphor; “The Old Bus,” which captures a humble daily ritual with unusual warmth; and “The Need For Gardens,” a satirical meditation on ambition, domestication, and the desire to bury a lion-an emblem of how dreams collide with practical limits. The collection’s diversity-humor, pathos, whimsy, and grit-allows it to function both as a humoristic reading and a meditation on memory and place.
As one reviewer notes, the 62 pieces range from brisk sketches to longer prose-poems; some feel like the first brush strokes of bigger works, while others stand complete in their own right. Brautigan’s voice remains unmistakable: generous, quirky, affectionate toward the oddities of life, and relentless in its curiosity about what ordinary people carry inside them. The result is a luminous alternation of light and shadow, where a simple scene can open into a larger meditation on time, place, and the human heart.
For new readers, Revenge of the Lawn offers an ideal entry point: a compact, accessible invitation to Brautigan’s world, where small moments gain outsized meaning and where everyday life glows with an almost sacred whimsy. For longtime fans, it provides a renewed sense of the author’s versatility-the way he dances between humor and sorrow, streetwise colloquialism and lyrical grace, the concrete and the dreamlike.
In sum, Revenge of the Lawn presents Brautigan’s miniature universes as generous, strange, and deeply human. The collection invites readers to step into a sequence of micro-stories that feel both intimately familiar and playfully fantastic, where poetry and prose fuse into a single, brisk, and shimmering experience.
Plot summary, “Sombrero Fallout” by Richard Brautigan in 2 Minutes - Book Review
- Overview: A compact collection of 62 ultra-short pieces set in Tacoma and San Francisco, blending humor, memory, and surreal imagery.
- Style: Prose poetry, micro-fiction, and sketches that function as vignettes rather than traditional plots.
- Themes: Memory, place, ordinary life, whimsy, heartbreak, and the tension between dream and reality.
- Notable Entries: Homage to the San Francisco YMCA; The Old Bus; The Need For Gardens; 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 (as cited in various receptions).
- Reception: Praised for its originality, sensitivity, and fearless playful imagination; considered a bridge between Beat and later countercultural literary sensibilities.
Ultimately, the book is a testament to Brautigan’s ability to turn the mundane into something luminous, to render a fleeting moment into a memory that endures, and to weave humor and tenderness into a fabric that feels both intimate and expansive.