So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

infobox Book |
name = So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away
title_orig =
translator =


author = Richard Brautigan
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher = Delacorte Press/ Seymour Lawrence
release_date = 1982
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages = 131
isbn = ISBN 0-440-08195-5 (hardback edition)
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away" is a novel written by Richard Brautigan, published in 1982.

Plot summary

The story is about a narrator in 1979 remembering the events that happened when he was 13 in 1948. The young narrator lives in a lower class Oregon neighborhood and collects beer bottles or does favors for neighbors to get money. He also spends time alone fishing in a pond near the town. Instead of buying a hamburger at a local diner, he buys bullets from the gunshop across the street. The book starts with this, and then hovers and builds around this event until the ends. While shooting rotten apples at an abandoned orchard with a friend, he accidentally shoots and kills him. Because the shooting was an accident he was acquitted, but because of his newly won reputation, his mother (a waitress) doesn't get any tips anymore, he gets in fights at school, and they're forced to move. The book ends with a return to an observation of two obese people fishing in a temporarily set up "living room" by the pond. Most of the book is made up of observations of the different strange characters that surrounded him when he was a kid.

This is a semi-autobiography novel Brautigan had written because of similar events as a child. However the shooting was a ficitious account. Some of the events in the novel are mentioned in a biography "You Can't Catch Death" written by his daughter Ianthe Elizabeth Brautigan.

Film adaption

A thirty minute film based on this novel was produced by Swensen Productions (Ianthe Brautigan and husband Paul Swensen) and shown at the New York Film Festival in June of 2000 and the Los Angeles Film Festival in October of 2000. The screenplay was written by Robert Duxbury.

Truth from fiction

"So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away" is a semi-autobiographical novel and which some events were truth and some were fictitious. The main character is the author surrogate in the book having the same birthday, living in the same place and being the same ages which were 13 in 1948 and 44 in 1979. The fatal shooting was fictional and in real life Brautigan accidentally shot part of his best friend's brother's ear only injuring him slightly.

External links

* [http://www.brautigan.net/ Brautigan Bibliography and Archive]
* [http://www.brautigan.net/wind.html Entry on brautigan.net]