Trout Fishing In America

A unique stylist, capturing a time and place. Read in California but sixty years late.

This is a little bit of a cheat. I’ve read this book before. But I read it again this year. I tend to read it every year.

In an era when time is a commodity constantly depleted by phones and screens when we don’t have the luxury of boredom to foster daydreaming, Brautigan celebrates the power of the imagination. His writing feels like what you would get if I sat you down at the side of an empty rural highway to wait for a bus that never comes, and all you have to occupy yourself are the flights of your… show more.

Popularised as a 1960s counterculture book, its author, Brautigan, playfully breaks all the rules in a modern Dadaistic style of commentary which is a sort of stream of consciousness that verges on playful and purposeful madness. Thoughts of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass come to mind when trying to make any sense of this author’s zany work here. In a word: trout? No trout. This is no commentary about fishing. It’s a mishmash of essay-like commentaries on an ‘on the road’ lifestyle which does occasionally mention fishing.