The jaded, unnamed narrator, dumped by his beautiful, Japanese lover, screws up his story about an ice-cold sombrero into a ball of paper and throws it in the bin at the beginning of Richard Brautigan’s 1976 novel, “Sombrero Fallout”. While he pines pathetically over a single lost strand of her hair, we, the readers, travel through the room and towards the wastepaper basket, over to the printed, screwed up ball, where we learn that this mysterious sombrero has fallen from the sky, at minus 24 degrees, and somehow results in a town going mad. I mean really mad. The townspeople start wailing on each other. First with fists, then with knives, then with live ammunition. They eventually overrun the town police. And the sombrero sits innocently on the pavement, ignored by all.

Meanwhile, the narrator, evidently a writer (so of course emotionally unstable and quite insecure), reminisces the history of what he deems his great love affair. He recalls their first act of love, the stunning first impression she made on him, disclosing that she’d read all his books but (kindly) refusing to ever speak to him about them, and of course, her curtain of straight black hair. He trawls through his phonebook and imagines imperfect scenarios, and doesn’t give the sombrero, or the angry mob, a second thought.

And while he does all this, his Japanese lover sleeps. She sleeps because it’s the only place she can see her suicidal father’s grave again, and the only place where everything is right in her world.

And while she sleeps, and he pines, and the townspeople riot, I feel my heart, piece by piece, giving itself wholly and unreservedly to Brautigan’s strange and alluring prose. Its effortless comedy, as displayed through the town librarian whose ears are shot off, and its careful melancholy tone, as the Japanese woman remembers the suicide of her father when she was still a girl, are woven together impeccably.

But the narrator and protagonist, our dumped writer (ironically a famous American humourist), is pathetic. Enigmatic, complex, but ultimately, pathetic. His mind wanders often and he processes his thoughts obtusely.

Sometimes he talked to himself a lot and he was talking to himself about the absence of eggs in his apartment.

“Where are those eggs?” he said to himself. “They must be here somewhere,” and all the time knowing that there were no eggs in the kitchen.

He was just starting to think about looking for them in other rooms, perhaps the bedroom, when a lightning bolt of despair suddenly fried his brain into thousands of pieces of dancing bacon. He remembered his love for the Japanese woman.” p95

Well, I guess he had only been dumped that very evening. So perhaps I’m being a hardarse.