Year of the Monkey (2019)
by Patti Smith Rock musician Patti Smith’s diary-like, dream-logic memoir of 2016 is written as a roaming, often hallucinatory travelogue where the plot is less about destinations than about grief, omens, and the way reality starts to behave when you’re bracing for loss. Patti Smith It reads like a senior nomad meditating on the death and decay of dear old friends, framed by the death of record producer Sandy Pearlman and the slow decline of playwright Sam Shepard from ALS. At the beginning you’re not always sure what’s happening versus what’s being dreamed, remembered, or symbolically staged, and the reader has to do a lot of the sorting. The opening is bewildering, floaty and disjointed, capturing the condition of being half-awake in grief and anxiety. "A Dream Year" (Chinese) But it gathers strength and momentum and shifts toward more concrete imagery and sharper storytelling as it goes. "Year of the Monkey" (Serbian) There is a more straightforward back...
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