Group items tagged

So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away is hugely underrated in the Brautigan canon. The narrative is laced with a sense of sadness for a lost way of life, the loss of childhood and the death of the American gothic, something Brautigan blames on television for the way it "crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their fantasies with dignity". Whereas in earlier works, Brautigan's characters viewed the world with child-like fascination, in this last book he reverses the process by examining a child's world through an adult's sad and diminishing gaze. It's a summation of all that Brautigan had previously achieved but in the harsher, colder climate of the late 20th century.