Year of the Monkey

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Pub Date 24 Sep 2019 | Archive Date 24 Sep 2019

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Description

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.

Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, with no design yet heeding signs, including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger’s words, “Anything is possible: after all, it’s the year of the monkey.” For Patti Smith - inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

Smith melds the Western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from Southern California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places - this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment. But as Patti Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope of a better world.

Riveting, elegant, often humorous, illustrated by Smith’s signature Polaroids, Year of the Monkey is a moving and original work, a touchstone for our turbulent times.

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.

...


Advance Praise

PRAISE FOR PATTI SMITH

‘Beautiful, incredible - it will make you ache for a time and a place that you probably never knew’ Nick Hornby

‘This book is so honest and pure as to count as a true rapture’ Joan Didion

‘A sharp, elegiac and finely crafted’ Sunday Times

‘Terrifically evocative ... Spellbinding and diverting’ New York Times

‘Tender, harrowing, often hilarious’ Vogue

‘She was once our savage Rimbaud, but suffering has turned her into our St John of the Cross, a mystic full of compassion’ Edmund White

PRAISE FOR PATTI SMITH

‘Beautiful, incredible - it will make you ache for a time and a place that you probably never knew’ Nick Hornby

‘This book is so honest and pure as to count as a true...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781526614759
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Average rating from 21 members


Featured Reviews

A really really good read, as I would expect from Patti Smith. The book is an interesting mix- Part Travelogue, part rumination on the events and atmophere of the current times, part reflective introspection. Any one would of these elements would have made for an interesting enough read, Taken togther it makes for an intriguing journey, if a passage or two doesn't resonate then one that will is certain be along shortly. Highly recommended.

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What can be said about the writing of Patti Smith that hasn’t already been said? Her writing is immersive and beautiful, and I will always seek out her work whenever there’s something new.

Written during the year 2016, the year that Patti turns 70, Tr*mp is elected and the titular Chinese Year of the Monkey, Patti spends her time travelling, dreaming and musing on the way that life passes.

I’m grateful to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for the chance to read this preview copy, it was such a treat.

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This is a beautiful meditation by Patti on the year she turned 70 (2015 into 2016). It an evocation of her friendships particularly with Sandy Pearlman and Sam Shepard written in a beautiful dreamlike quality and interspersed with her own photography. A little treasure of a book.

Thanks to Bloomsbury and Netgalley for a review copy.

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Reading this, I found myself wondering whether it would have been published if it hadn't been written by Patti Smith. That is not to say that is not beautifully written, broad in its range or powerful in its description of both the personal and the edges where the personal and the political meet. The Year of the Monkey is travelogue, autobiography, diary of 2016 and essay. I didn't see the echoes of Didion that others have (would that be said if Smith were a man?), but plenty of other traces and influences - Kerouac and Sebald for example in the merging of dream, travel writing and speculation. Smith writes at one point that her writing evokes "a comic uneasiness", which is a nice, if not necessarily accurate, description. Towards the end of the book, reflecting on the deaths of so many people and at the end of what at best could be called a challenging year, she adds "Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen". That is why we should be happy that it has been published, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to read it.

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This book reads like poetry in that there is no true story in it. More a collection of feelings and experiences of the writer traveling around America. A meditation on growing older and losing friends but also being truly free of expectation. A very interesting read that washes over the reader very gently.

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