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| One of Brautigan's many personae |
by Hugh Gilmore
What
an ordeal. I just finished a very long, tedious, but quite fascinating book whose
final, inevitable paragraphs made me quite sad. Once I committed to writing about it, I felt like
saying, "I am Lazarus, come from the dead/Come back to tell you all, I
shall tell you all...” (after T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”). Though I’m not sure that I can.
The
book is William Hjorstberg’s 880-page
biography-down-to-the-last-scrap-of-paper, “Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and
Times of Richard Brautigan.” It was originally published around this time last
year. It took me three weeks of daily reading to finish this book. And I never
particularly cared for, nor was interested in Richard Brautigan, as poet,
novelist, icon or man. And to make matters harder, I read the book on my
Kindle.
Do
you know what it is like to read an 880-page book on a Kindle? For one thing,
the “page” is too small and confining. More importantly, without the benefit of
turning a page and seeing a higher page number that helps you mark your
progress, the process seems endless. A Kindle indicates the percentage of the
total you’ve read so far. To move 10% you must page-click the word equivalent
of 88 book pages. At the font size I used, it took about 10 clicks to move 1 %.
Close to 900 clicks to move through 10 percent of the book. Two weeks into the
book, though I was enjoying it immensely, I wished I were done. I was at 40%. I
started pushing. I read at all hours of the day. Last Saturday night I
finished. And I was quite sad about how it ended.
