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First published in 1967, Trout Fishing in America is a series of related vignettes that are based on Brautigan’s childhood, his life in San Francisco and a camping trip to Idaho with his wife and child. It’s zen like, trippy, ethereal, left-field, mindbending, surreal, insightful, gonzo and hilarious all in a fine equilibrium. I found the book by accident during a booksale at the Queen’s Bookstore in Belfast (Note, the Queen has stopped buying books from this store in 1998 when some chewing gum got stuck in her crown when she put in on the counter while looking through her handbag trying to find her credit card)
Trout fishing is referenced thoughout the book both literally and allegorically. In this regard, its probably a distant cousin, albeit a wacky farout cousin of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance with regards to the subject being a fulcrum for larger or surreal issues to be leveraged.
The musican/singer Jarvis Cocker recites passages from Brautigan’s work when on stage and one of the moon’s craters is named after Shorty, a characters from Trout Fishing in America.
Nothing I can write here about this book can do it justice so this extract below is a worthy microcosm for this enigmatic and influential novel. The following is an epitaph ascribed to a character named Alonso Hagen:
‘I’ve had it
I’ve gone fishing now for seven years
and I haven’t caught a single trout
I’ve lost every trout I ever hooked
They either jump off
or twist off
or squirm off
or break my leade
of flop off
or fuck off
I’ve never even gotten my hands on a trout
For all its frustration
I believe it was an interesting experiment
in total loss
but next year somebody else
will have to go trout fishing
Somebody else will have to go
out there’
Did make me laugh but there was definitely talk about trout fishing, granted not in a boring How to do format but u duped me nonetheless Lol And I never knew the queen chewed gum until now so I did learn something 😉