Reading Patti Smith's Year of the Monkey lit a strange spark within, and magic climbed out of the nooks and crannies and in-between places, setting off at the kind of breathless pace one can only ever hope to surrender to.
As the story ignites, our narrator has a testy conversation with a neon sign for the Dream Motel — ahem — I mean to say, the Dream Inn, where she imagines herself Alice trading verbal blows with the smoke-ring billowing caterpillar. At the same time, your humble reader, as it were, finds herself stumbling about in her new hometown, coming to a halt in front of a charming bar front for a place called The Rabbit Hole. A fervent celebrant of strange coincidences, your reader allows herself to step back and drink in the tableau: long wooden tables, curling gold script on the shop windows, tidy little tea menus, and a facade in which every last brick face has been transmuted into a Tenniel illustration. The reader blinks twice, smiles and lifts her thumb off the passage she was reading when her foot caught on the sidewalk and she looked up:
However, my departure was derailed by a sudden popping-up of animated Tenniel: The upright Mock Turtle. The fish and frog servants. The Dodo decked in his one grand jacket sleeve, the horrid Duchess and the Cook, and Alice herself, glumly presiding over an endless tea party, where, pardon us all, no tea was being served.
Such is the strange Wonderland of Patti Smith's memoir. The line of coincidences is so palpable that the reader will no longer deign to refer to them as such. For after smacking into Tenniel precisely when the narrator wished me to, I found myself turning the dial on the radio to Nina Simone, contemplating dreams, calling for friends and for rain and for art telepathically, like something out of Stranger than Fiction. After the third or fourth such strike of magic, I am charmed, and I whisper to the pages, "you're more grimoire than memoir, and that's all right with me."
For Patti, it is a year of loss, grief, strange encounters, inscrutable dreams, and fog-laden memories. I, too, remember the Year of the Monkey, a time for mischief-strange, the palpable feeling of dread and unreality, the ironic workings of fate. For a memoir of a dual dreamer, a shapeshifting wordmother of a woman, it is a book that will wriggle under the skin and spirit you away like a Millennium Actress. For who among us hasn't ushered in a New Year with a heart full of vision only to come out of it jilted but not at all empty-handed?