This is a strange little book about a man dying from Aids who sneaks into a hospital with the help of his wife to have an experimental procedure meant to cure him. No other human has made it completely through the procedure because it is so painful (no anaesthetic allowed). The farthest any man has gone is to the ankle. How the machine works is really beyond me and really doesn't matter. What matters is the twist. The Doctor performing the procedure also happens to be sleeping with the patient's wife. And he also doesn't have a clue that his machine works.
As to be expected, the experiment doesn't fair too well for the patient. Thinking him dead the Doctor and the wife stuff the man into a suitcase, cart him off to the ocean, chain him to a Venus statue and dump him. But he's not dead. In fact, he's now indestructible. He is in a sort of coma-like state, but still able to think, for about ten years until his body wakes up. Now mobile, he roams the ocean floor for a few decades contemplating himself, who he describes as a "self-centered dick". Instead of pondering his wife's actions he ponders his own until he decides to meditate on his wife whom he realizes he truly loves. He tries to commit suicide by jumping into a lava crevice and turns up years later as a museum artefact. All this sounds incredulous but it isn't until near the end that the author lost me when the main character becomes a monkey man scaling tall building. Surprisingly the story has a happy but peculiar ending as the man reunites with his love. This piece constantly encourages the reader to put himself in the man place. Would you, if you had a terminal disease, put up with the most horrendous pain imaginable for one hour to have it cured? "This was not the torture of a thousand knives. It was six hundred billion knives and drills and lit matches concentrated into one layer of flesh."
The Love Song of Monkey is described as a story of love but I found it to be more about control. There are many themes within this short novella: death, rebirth, love, control, deceit, regret, and forgiveness. Even though the book is titled a novel. I would be hard pressed to call so few pages a novel. It barely has 149 pages. I think it falls more into the science fiction category rather than literary fiction. It is a quick interesting read however sparking thought and reflection.
The Love Song of Monkey was written by Michael S. A. Graziano, a professor of Psychology at Princeton University.
The Love Song of Monkey is available from Amazon.com.
The Love Song of Monkey is available from Amazon.ca.
M. E. Wood lives in Eastern Ontario, Canada. If you are going to find this eclectic reader and writer anywhere it is probably at her computer. For more information visit her official website.
