Year of the Monkey

A somewhat melancholy memoir of loss and dreams through 2016 into 2017.

After really loving her book, Just Kids, I was really excited to dig more into Patti Smith's writings. This one is a memoir, detailing her life throughout the year of 2016.

It is a LOT less focused than Just Kids, often being completely rambling, and the narrative sometimes slips between reality and dreams. Honestly there were times I had no idea wtf she was saying, but I loved it. Her writing is poetic and beautiful.

This book really shows how weird she is, but also just how intelligent and insightful as well. Her insights into art, music, literature, and humanity are incredible.

I'm not sure I'd recommend it to someone, but I'll say I sure loved it.

Patti tells us about her journey throughout 2016, which was The Year of the Monkey. This journey begins and ends at the same venue, the Fillmore in San Francisco. The route is physical, through the streets and roads of North American cities, and interior, as she shares her dreams.

Yes, dreams, thoughts, and all those things that happen to us when we have problems and try to silence them. I hope you read it. If you do, pay special attention to the hotel sign: it will surprise you when you reach the end.

One detail: Depending on which edition you read, it includes an "Epilogue to an Epilogue," in which she talks from her experience of the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Much more than highly recommended. (Translated from Spanish)

Oh, I really wanted to love this book but it wasn't anything like I imagined it to be. I adored 'Just Kids' and 'M Train' was just wonderful, they were both life-changing books for me but 'Year of the Monkey' was just too odd (and I like odd!) but this was almost like reading gibberish at times. There were too many vague references and I felt like she was trying to be a bit like Murakami weaving dreams into reality but I don't think that works when you're writing a memoir, as I had a hard time deciphering what was real and what wasn't. It was all over the place and at times just didn't make sense :( Ahhhhh, I really wanted to love this but I just didn't and I'm sad. Really sad. I'm sorry Patti :(

2016 becomes a surreal collage of travel memoir, a mix of poetry, fiction and images starting with a dialog between the author and a hotel billboard when The Dream Inn challenges her to dream. Poignantly the dreams are interrupted by the deaths of her friends playwright Tom Stoppard and Sandy Pearlman, producer and lyricist for the rock group Blue Öyster Cult.

The thing I liked most about this book is Smith’s ‘ability’ to find interesting readers of books everywhere. I wish! Finished 01.08.2020.

My first introduction to Patti Smith wasn’t as a writer. It was as a punk rock star in the 1970s. She was something of a caricature, mainly due to the Gilda Radner parody on Saturday Night Live. The SNL when it was funny.
I’ve never read anything by Smith, so this book was a bit of a slog for me. Having won the National Book Award for “Just Kids,” she is surely respected and firmly entrenched in the fabric of American writers. She’s legit. This book is a bit of stream of consciousness, a bit of counter culture, and a bit of Trump bashing. It is that last bit that I enjoyed the most even though it was almost an afterthought at the end. Few have described the nightmare that was election day 2016 better than Patti Smith.
Probably this book isn’t for everyone, maybe even not me. I’m still glad I read it because Patti Smith will be known as an important person in music and literature in this country for generations to come.

Starting on New Years Eve 2016 this is Smith's memoir of that year. Like her other books this one consists primarily of entries from her journals and notebooks, musings on those entries and, Polaroid photos of some her her favorite places and objects. Through 2016 Smith traveled through California, Arizona, Kentucky, and back home to New York. Throughout the year Smith deals with the illness of two close friends and her own aging process (she turned 70 in 2016). As usual Smith's musings are descriptive, but this time they are a mix of reality and dreams. This is my least favorite of Smith's books.
I enjoyed the section where she discussed Bolaño's 2666 with three strangers in a diner. I added that book to my reading list for 2021 because of that conversation. This felt to me like the least personal and the most disjointed of her memoirs.

I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway!

The trouble with dreaming, I was thinking, is that one can be drawn into a mystery that is no mystery at all, occasioning absurd observations and discourse leading to not a single reality-based conclusion. It was all to reminiscent of the labyrinthine banter of Alice and the Mad Hatter.

Full confession: To my friends' shock, this was the first Patti Smith book I'd read. And how interesting to start here! The year is 2016, and Patti Smith is blending the real with the poetic and dream-like in a way to make it through a year of aging (illness and death of those around her, her own 70th birthday) and the rough waters of the year that brought us the 2016 US election. I felt completely taken in on this journey, and her recollections of past and present had me dog-earing pages and ruminating over single sentences for several moments before moving on.

Before writing this review, I moved immediately on to Just Kids and the contrast between the books (in both setting and style) enhanced them both. I'm most excited to file Year of the Monkey in my bookshelf and turn to it from time to time as I get older, as I think with the book's age and with my own aging the meaning will continue to grow and gain new significance.

Beautiful, surreal, melancholy. I think this might just be my favorite book of Patti's yet. I read it in one evening.

Not much short of four decades ago, I had the good fortune to meet Patti Smith by chance at CBGBs, the legendary punk rock venue in New York. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I were visiting America for the first time, about to embark on trek out west that would see us driving the whole length of Route 66 before undertaking some postgraduate study in California. We had managed to obtain tickets for a gig (any gig!) at the iconic venue. At this remove of time I can’t even recall who was playing, although I do remember that the concert was pretty ropy. None of that mattered, of course, as we were simply starstruck by the surroundings and enjoying what amounted to a pilgrimage. We ventured to the bar and found ourselves standing next to Patti Smith and, emboldened by the adrenalin surge prompted by the occasion, plucked up the courage to talk to her. We had a pleasant conversation, and she seemed intrigued by the books poking from our respective pockets (Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk in Catherine’s case, and an original French edition of Swann’s Way in mine). So much so, in fact, that she asked us to meet her the following day at one of her favourite cafés. As our time in New York was very short, every moment had been strictly accounted for in advance, but obviously our schedules went straight out of the window and we agreed in a nanosecond.

Cafés, or at least regular doses of strong coffee, clearly play a huge part in Patti Smith’s life, and form the unifying theme of this volume of memoirs, as they did for both M Train and Just Kids. Indeed, T. S. Eliot’s line, ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’ might have proved a worthy epigraph. In this volume she describes her travels around America, and principally California, Arizona and Kentucky during 2016. That year was notable for what seemed like a disproportionately high number of celebrity deaths, and Smith muses on this growing roll of bereavement. It proves a particularly difficult year for her as, in addition to a large number of musicians with whom she had some degree of acquaintance, two particularly close friends subside into illness, and then die.

As ever, her prose style is frequently beautiful and moving – somehow completely at odds with the ferocity of her early stage persona. I remember being both exhilarated but also almost frightened while watching her performances from the 1970s, when she would shout and rage at the audience. While the strength of character and self-assurance (I know, I know, a dirty word!) that underpinned those performances clearly remains, age appears to have mellowed her, and there is a contemplative tranquillity about many of these pieces, tinged with sadness though they are.

I found a very comfortable and trippy home between the covers of this book. It has a great feeling of drifting and reflecting on the events and people in Patti Smith’s life of 2016. The book is thankfully far from a sequential and orderly reciting of dates, happenings, and places. Every so often, in amongst the pages, is one of her famed Polaroid photos, which fit so well with her words. With her previous memoirs, Just Kids (which had such a life to it, as she described her time with Robert Mapplethorpe) and M Train (which was more reflective, but not to the extent of this book), I didn’t remember liking them nearly as much as this one. In Monkey, her writing seems much more fluid, and the line between a memory from a specific point in her life and her dreams, has a comforting and vague definition to it.
Let me quote the book’s jacket, “Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland.” I loved being drawn in, as she travels the California coast near Santa Cruz, describes her time in the Arizona desert, travels to a farm in Kentucky, and visits her declining personal mentor/producer/manager, Sandy Pearlman, in a hospital. It was Pearlman (a rock critic) who approached Smith very early on and told her that she should front a rock band. Patti’s response was straightforward (and pure music to this former bookseller’s ears), “I just laughed and told him I had a good job working in a bookstore.”
In this memoir, she is dealing with the intense sorrow of losing her friends (Sam Shepard and Pearlman), the collective shame and pain of our national politics, the heaviness of modern life, thoughts of her past, and her approaching 70th birthday. She reflects on all of it, and searches for and finds hope for the future.
She was there for her former lover, Shepard, as he was struggling with ALS, and trying to finish his very last book, The One Inside. She was his hands as much of the final writing and editing on the book was finished.
I appreciate all the wisdom, wit, writing skill, and heart that she brought to this book, without it ever becoming awkward or heavy-handed. Between the covers of Year of the Monkey, was a fascinating, stimulating, humorous, and always interesting world of the real and the delightfully ethereal.

Surrealism in words. Free flowing thoughts, a fever dream, all can be used when experiencing this latest voyage through Smith's thoughts. An experience it is, interpretations, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in reality, non linear, but her words, descriptions are poetic. Starting with an old friend who is in the hospital dying, what he meant to her, taking her back to the past, comparisons with all she sees. Her last year before turning seventy in the year of the monkey. Her husband gone twenty years now, her friend Sam Shepherd, struggling with ALS, her past, her dreams, all blending into the present, the future. A little talk of music, books, but mostly of signs, how things can be interpreted.

Like Ali Smith, the nearest comparison i can make, though Ali is fiction, this Smith non, memoir, but both are unique in the writing field. Sometimes it was hard to decipher what was the dream, the actual experience? How does it apply to her reality now as it is, or was? Still can't quite figure Ernest's part, but despite that her words, the way she uses them often had me transfixed. Does her mind ever shutdown, her thoughts stop?

I listened to this, she reads and it was wonderful to here her recent musings, thoughts, in her own smokey voice.

I cannot say enough about Patti Smith, a polymath of the first order: as a poet, riveting; a singer, passionate; a personality, charismatic; but as a writer of prose, words simply fail me. I was always something of a fair-weather fan, even after meeting her by accident one afternoon while walking down some urban, dirty boulevard. She was the one who accosted me and we chatted there on the street; when I mentioned that a favorite of mine was singing in a concert that night, she quickly interjected that she, too, would be there. I thought, not unkindly, that while she was down to earth she was still a diva, which was OK by me. You see, she is not only a diva but a saint of sorts, and the world badly needs both! Simply put, this book describes her journey through the year 2016, starting in Santa Cruz and ending in the east on the Chinese New Year. Hounded by her dreams, death, and drama she moves through the demimonde, allowing a heightened artistic sensibility to propel her from place to place. I felt lucky to be able to tag along!

Musings about life and death at age 70. Smith has written a lyrical memoir in a stream of consciousness style covering her experiences and memories during the year with both realistic and dream sequences. She blends the two remarkably well, emphasizing their similarity and providing the reader access to her most intimate thoughts. Most of us don't remember our dreams, so this reflects her habit of recording just about everything in little notebooks and photographs. She travels, visits dying friends, meets mysterious strangers and, especially, takes notes and pictures. Many of the latter are included in the book. One is struck by her pessimism about how things seem to be going poorly in the year of the monkey, notably the deaths of two close friends. She demonstrates a good grasp of pop culture, classical literature, mythology and politics. This gives the book a narrative sweep that has both breadth and depth. A most satisfying short read. It can easily be read in a single sitting and I recommended giving that a try.