Freight Paperback – September 9, 2011

Interesting life experiences. The story jumps around and links to other parts of the book. I bought this for my Kindle and enjoyed his point of view. This is a weird story, but it makes sense to me perfectly.

Bosworth's FREIGHT is the kind of book we might've seen from Brautigan had he written a choose-your-own-adventure book and, of course, stayed sober. It's got all the inventiveness and charm of a Brautigan, but the center of it never comes apart. It's an insightful rumination on the things we carry, and how those things impact our lives. Mistakes, regrets, fears, sorrows -- we carry them all, just as we carry our victories and joys. Bosworth's unnamed narrator gives us an inner landscape full of empathy and Zen-like zoans of love and human epiphany. After reading it, you'll want to be one of the things Bosworth carries...because you will 'put it down' and it will become part of you.

Mel Bosworth's debut novel Freight is a little difficult to explain. The narrator is in love and let's you look inside his personal moments with his lover from both the past and the present. The book is written non-chronologically, so you jump around the narrator's life. Honestly, you can start the book wherever you choose. So in a way it's a choose-your-own-adventure book for adults. There's not too much to say about this novel. It's something you have to experience. Scratch that, it's something that all of us have experienced at one point or another so it's a wonderful trip down memory lane. Also, the old-school, beaten down cover is lovely. Freight is a tender, passionate novel that will tug at your heartstrings.

Freight I Found:If you hang around for long enough and don't destroy yourself proper, you get lucky and come across those good bits that Hansel and Gretel left behind in that forest. Yesterday on my run through the woods I found a $20 bill. It was just sprawled there in the soil, wet and limp for my taking. The day before that I found Mel Bosworth's first full novel "Freight" at my door. It was also just sprawled there but on my porch, crisp and clean, for my taking. And so I did.Freight I Ate:I ate Mel Bosworth's "Freight" quickly, but not without digesting it properly. It sounds like a contradiction of terms, but believe me...it settled down nicely. I ate "Freight" without adding any salt or pepper or chili flakes or Tabasco. Because it didn't need any of that. It was perfect as it was served. I ate it alongside a bottle of red wine. And then alongside another bottle of wine. So it could break down properly, you see.Freight is the elegant, sensitive story of a man who carries things with him. Within him. Around him. And sometimes even above him. Freight is the story of every man. Or...EveryMan. Sometimes he discards things because the burden gets too heavy or because it sickens him, and sometimes he takes on too much. But he really doesn't discard all of anything. Bits of things remain for him to haul along. Things. You know these things well. They're life. Your lifeFreight I Destroyed (epilogue):I did no such thing. Mel Bosworth's "Freight" now resides quietly and comfortably on my shelf in my living room, just on top of Louis Armstrong's biography. I don't fear for its safety, though. Satchmo can carry that burden quite well. In fact, I'll bet he's thumbing through the chapters right now sporting that wide-tooth smile of his that captivated people almost as much as his blowing the hell out of that horn. Sometimes it is a Wonderful World.

When I was a wee fellow, I could transform tree branches into ray guns, bed sheets into fully functional flight mechanisms, and crawdads into intergalactic sea creatures. My dirt-scrapingly dull pocket knife could save the world, and on particularly clear nights I could ting a pebble off of the moon with my slingshot. I was a kid: oblivious, blissful, and overflowing with wonder.Reminiscing is a means by which we explore our various eras, phases, mistakes, and elations in order to evaluate the person/s we have become. At the very least , reminiscing allows us a means by which we may perpetuate our child-like wonder, re-explore that which defines our respective constructs of love, or lack of love--the pigeon-toed girl wearing the stretched out V-neck T-shirt, the gentle neo-hippie prancing barefoot in the sand--reminiscing is visceral, terrifying, addicting, thick, and adjective upon adjective upon adjective. However, in its purest incarnation, reminiscing simply takes us home.In Mel Bosworth's debut novel, Freight, we find ourselves led through a non-chronological-if-you-so-wish collection of encoded memories by our nostalgic narrator: a nameless, occasionally matter-of-fact, occasionally hyperbolic fellow who is searching--for that which is largely determined by the respective conglomeration of muck and paper airplanes and funerals and laugh-until-you-cries which coalesce uniquely within each of us--but ultimately, our narrator is searching for that place he defines as home, whether figuratively or literally.Iconic objects permeate this multi-tiered search and each performs a specific, often overwhelmingly polar emotional function: tackling a freshly built snowman, our narrator's hands coming together as womb, results in a profound declaration of love and demonstrates the lengths to which our narrator will go to express his love, even if only for his recently destroyed snowman. This type of behavior thickly populates Freight and ensures that we challenge our own mastery of self-awareness. Despite the heft of the freight with which our narrator is grappling, we know that he knows what he likes and in this knowing we connect intensely, almost telepathically with our narrator and fight through the muck to rediscover, and possibly redefine home.Sometimes, however, our narrator confuses those items he likes--cedar chest as time machines, a cute, drunken blonde girl--for those inherently deep affirmations he needs: it's okay that he assassinated the baby birds when he was husky; it's okay that he can't fix everything. In both this confusion as well as in the numerous snapshots stuffed with tranquility and clarity, Freight reminds us to savor every moment regardless of where each may land on the good/bad spectrum and to remain relentlessly and unapologetically alive. After all, that is what the search is all about, right?

I love this hot little number. It's good in the hands, is sweet on the eyes, it's a lump of sugar in the heart.