Customer Reviews (5)

Hilarious, unpredictable, weird....thumbs up!
They may not be exactly curve balls, but the stuff Brautigan throws at his readers during this comic/tragic slice of life is unlike anything read before.Bowling trophies are stolen and thus become a murderous obsession for three bumbling brothers.An unfortunate case of STD leads to a strained S&M relationship that drives a couple apart.The title character is a paper maiche bird, and that's about his role.Each chapter is a short burst of hilarity, moments in sad characters lives that are funny to the outsider but quite painful to the characters themselves.Yet still the laughs come easily, guiltily, due to Brautigan's light yet commanding touch of the English language.
Amidst all the humor and pure irreverence, the character's gain a humanity in that all their foibles are so human, if not taken to the extreme.Thus, when the disparate threads crash in a violent climax, the result maintains a tragic edge while still being appropriate to the tone and craziness of the story.
Think Dali in Print: everything is warped, twisted, and out of proportion to reality, but it somehow packs an emotional wallop.

BEAUTIFUL.
If I could describe Richard Brautigan's word-art greatness, I'd be writing books, not reviews. Do yourself a BIG favor and buy ALL of Richard's incredible books.

tragic i think not
i found this book to be hilarious.it will never leave my top 10.its set up to look like a tragedy but really to me it just points out the hilariousness of our lives.a great relationship turned into uncomfortable sadistic love making due to stds.hilarious, it just pokes and pokes fun at are responses to things we find hard to deal with.three brothers become completely depressed and obsessed about finding their trophies instead of just winning more, its quite a magnificent look into the human behavior.

two thumbs up and and two pointer fingers to make two guns to shoot off for this wonderful, fabulous book.

Oh, Willard, Willard, Willard.
This novel is about fate and tragedy and people whose lives are connected by circumstance. It has all the Brautigan touches: poetry as prose, simple writing, great turns of phrase, and a story that is at once outlandish, hilarious, tragic and wholly original.

The story involves two couples and three brothers. One couple has a very healthy, happy relationship. In their apartment is Willard, a bird sculpture, and some bowling trophies they purchased at a sale years ago. These are second-hand bowling trophies. The other couple's relationship isn't as happy. The husband is depressed, and the wife, in an attempt to make him happy, participates in his S&M fantasies though she doesn't enjoy them. The brothers, as the story goes, were once good, upstanding citizens from a good upstanding family. That is, until several years ago when their bowling trophies were stolen, destroying their faith in humanity. They made a pact to recover the bowling trophies, whatever the cost, and began down a road of violence and murder.

You either love or hate Brautigan's work. I'm in the former camp. I don't know any writer so unique. Part of the beauty in his work is in the depth behind the simplicity. But like a simple painting, one person might look and say, "My seven-year-old could have done that," while another, like myself, finds that pretty much all of Brautigan's work speaks to them in some way.

Along with SO THE WIND WON'T BLOW IT ALL AWAY and AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN, WILARD is one of Brautigan's tragic novels. In fact, in one of my favorite parts of the novel, the husband reads from a book of bits and pieces of Greek tragedies because only bits and pieces have survived through the years. But he's fascinated by them because he can feel the tragedy of the whole in just a few words. In the same way, in Willard we are given a thin slice of the life of these characters, but we feel the tragedy of the whole.

Mind boggling
This is the first Brautigan book I read and it was great.I feel that anyone who wants to get introduced to the writting of Brautigan get this book. ... Read more