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.
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| 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.
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| "A Dream Year" (Chinese) |
But it gathers strength and momentum and shifts toward more concrete imagery and sharper storytelling as it goes.
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| "Year of the Monkey" (Serbian) |
There is a more straightforward back half you can latch onto without having to love the dream-logic from page one.
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| "Year of the Monkey" (Czech) |
Toward the end, she writes about conversations with Sam in which they discussed writing a work that could not truly be classified as either fiction or non-fiction, and the book starts to feel like that idea made flesh.
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| "Year of the Monkey" (Bulgarian) |
A moving portrayal of loss without tidy consolation, it closes on the sense that nothing is resolved. Sandy is gone, Sam is fading, but Patti goes on.
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