In 'Year of the Monkey,' rocker Patti Smith blurs past and present to move past loss.
“Year of the Monkey” is a book of dreaming. Not individual dreams so much as the condition itself. “I just sighed,” she confides late in this deft and enigmatic narrative. “Was it all a dream? Was everything a dream?” She is referring equally to the story she is telling and the insubstantiality of life.
For anyone familiar with her career, those souls will be familiar: the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, her brother Todd, her late husband Fred. The last two appear in “Year of the Monkey,” as well as an array of cultural heroes, including Roberto Bolaño and Jerry Garcia.
Smith makes the connection explicit in the way she activates her dreaming as a narrative device. “Our dreams are a second life,” she writes, quoting the French romantic Gérard de Nerval.
The real reckoning “Year of the Monkey” makes, however, is with mortality — or, perhaps more accurately, with time. Taking as its frame the Chinese Year of the Monkey, the book begins in January 2016 and ends after the inauguration of Donald Trump. That’s a different sort of reckoning, and it has its place here, although Smith is careful not to let it overwhelm. Or maybe it’s just that she sees it as one more reason to hold onto what matters, for as long, and as fully, as she can.
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