Saturday at Zenda. Saturday of contemporary classics. On this Saturday, we present The Year of the Monkey, a moving memoir by the American musician and writer Patti Smith (born Chicago, 1946) that has just been reissued in DeBolsillo’s catalog, with a Spanish translation by Ana Mata Buil. In its pages, Smith offers a view of her own biography as well as of her artistic career, grounded in the people with whom she was writing each phase of her life. The result is a beautiful book, filled with moments of unusual beauty, in which one can sense that great discoveries always appear at times when love prevails.
When I looked at my image on the mercury-gray surface of the toaster, I noticed that I looked young and old at the same time.
The publisher notes about the book: “It is two o’clock in the morning of New Year’s Eve 2015 when Patti Smith arrives at the Dream Motel, by the Santa Cruz beach, after giving a concert at the legendary Fillmore in San Francisco. She has just turned seventy. On the first morning of the year, she goes out for a walk and takes her first Polaroid of the hotel sign, with which she carries on a lucid conversation, like a modern Alice in her own Wonderland. The conversation inspires a few verses, and she decides to return to her room, from whose terrace she listens to the waves and thinks of her friend Sandy Pearlman, the famous music producer, who has been in a coma for two days. He was the one who suggested in his youth that she form a rock band. Thus begins a journey along the West Coast, the Arizona desert, Manhattan or Kentucky, but also through remembered or imagined landscapes, of the external world and the inner, in which Patti Smith invites us to wander by her side as her most intimate companions.
This edition closes with an emotional epilogue written in response to the events of 2020.”
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Author: Patti Smith. Translation: Ana Mata Buil. Title: The Year of the Monkey. Publisher: DeBolsillo. Retail: Todos tus libros.