An Unfortunate Woman, Richard Brautigan
An Unfortunate Woman, Richard Brautigan
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An Unfortunate Woman
A Journey

Author: Richard Brautigan

Narrator: Jim Meskimen

Unabridged: 3 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/30/2016

Synopsis

This is Richard Brautigan’s last novel, published posthumously in 2000, now in audio for the first time.Richard Brautigan was an original—brilliant and wickedly funny. His books resonated with the 1960s, making him an overnight counterculture hero. Taken in its entirety, his body of work reveals an artistry that outreaches the literary fads that so quickly swept him up.Dark, funny, and exquisitely haunting, his final book-length fiction explores the fragile, mysterious shadowland surrounding death. Told with classic Brautigan wit, poetic style, and mordant irony, An Unfortunate Woman assumes the form of a peripatetic journal chronicling the protagonist’s travels and oblique ruminations on the suicide of one woman and the death of a close friend from cancer.After Richard Brautigan committed suicide, the manuscript of An Unfortunate Woman was found among his possessions by his only child, daughter Ianthe Brautigan. It had been completed over a year earlier but was still unpublished at the time of his death. Finding that it was too painful to face her father’s presence page after page, she put the manuscript aside.Years later, having completed a memoir about her father’s life and death, Ianthe Brautigan reread An Unfortunate Woman, and finally, clear-eyed, she saw that it was her father’s work at its best and had to be published.

About Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington, and moved to San Francisco in the mid-1950s when he became involved in the emerging beat scene. During the 1960s, he became one of the most prominent and prolific writers of the counterculture. Out of this period came some of his most famous works, the best known of which are Trout Fishing in America; his collection of poetry, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster; and his collection of stories, Revenge of the Lawn. Translated the world over, his works helped establish him as one of the most significant American writers of his generation. As his popularity waned towards the end of the 1970s, he became increasingly disillusioned about his work and his life. He committed suicide in 1984. He was the author of eleven novels, ten volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, and miscellaneous nonfiction pieces, works that often employed parody, satire, and black comedy.

About Jim Meskimen

Jim Meskimen is a stage, film, and television actor who has appeared in many well-known movies and television shows. He acted in Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon for director Ron Howard, both of which were nominated for Best Picture Oscars. His television appearances include The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Friends, Lie to Me, Criminal Minds, and Parks and Recreation. He is also a painter, award-winning audiobook narrator, and audiobook director for Galaxy Audio.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on November 16, 2022

An Unfortunate Woman is a travelogue, of sorts: a nonlinear journal of travelling along the roads of life, a set of chaotic memories, blurred impressions and odd fantasies. Cats don’t know that people are writing books about them that are splashed all over the best-seller lists and that millions of p......more

Quotes

“An Unfortunate Woman is not only vintage Brautigan but is among his best, filled with breathtaking insights about our life now.” Jim Harrison, New York Times bestselling author

“I read it in one sitting—its only 110 pages—and felt the loss of this remarkable talent. His insights into life were incredible.” USA Today

“In this posthumously released novel, Richard Brautigan’s voice—quipping, punning, strewn with non sequiturs—comes like a rattling of chains…Devoted readers will find the dark, self-revealing side of a man who felt middle age like a blow to the head.” Amazon.com, editorial review

“The gravity-free movement of Brautigan’s remarkable mind, the piercing comic insights, the deft evocation of the thoroughly marginal places are aching reminders of this most original writer.” Thomas McGuane, author and screenwriter of The Missouri Breaks

“How fortunate we are to have another book by our friend Richard Brautigan, a man we all respected and loved.” Peter Fonda, film writer, producer, and co-star of Easy Rider

“Now comes an eccentric little novel finished in 1982—and this droll, gifted, brilliant writer comes to life all over again…Like Laurence Sterne, Brautigan is ‘actually writing about something quite serious, but in a roundabout way,’ and, like Whitman, he’s writing about the greatest enormities as sensed in the smallest turnings of nature and—of self….Toward the end, the sorrow is transformed for the reader into something ever durable, hopeful, and alive. A treasure.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A semiautobiographical description of one man’s experience of the classic symptoms of depression…Even so, Brautigan maintains his ironic humor and his ability to write clear, often crystalline prose…The reader cannot help being moved by this candid cri de coeur of a soul in anguish, and to his fans, these last words will be a book to treasure.” Publishers Weekly

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