Little Boy
How does one review the experimental novel of an author who celebrates his 100th birthday on March 24, 2019, yet continues to take chances with his oeuvre? With awe and reverence towards the literary traditions and anti-traditions he represents, although it is not easy to divide Ferlinghetti the writer from Ferlinghetti the legend—a poet, social and cultural activist, the founder of City Lights Booksellers and member of the Beat Generation, who was arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
Far from settling down, Ferlinghetti has given the world, in the year leading up to his centennial, no conventional memoir, nor a straightforward biographical novel taking stock of his life, but rather a startling original work that reminds this reviewer, at least, of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, that classic of French surrealism, the roman fleuve, which mixes personal reminiscences with astute social and artistic observations. Just as Aragon criticized the modern crisis of rational thought at a moment in history when fascism and populism were sadly in the ascendance, Ferlinghetti expands what begins as the evocation of a childhood into a fresh reflection upon the challenges facing 21st-century readers, such as the fate of the human race and the future of the planet.
Mixing autobiography and essay in the tradition of Montaigne and Sebald, Ferlinghetti’s Little Boy resurrects T S Eliot’s Waste Land as well as the Beat Generation greats. A fascinating evocation of fiction at its most daring.
