Little Boy: A Novel

The publisher calls it "A novelistic memoir by famed poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.”

I say it’s a rich stew of words, a stream of consciousness poem in one long sentence filled with allusions both literary and historic, surreal, sharp, ironic, and a joy to read covering a century of the poet’s life written a year before his death.

Ferlinghetti, himself writes: "And I am just waking in the vortex of past time, as it were a kind of Noctrama, a structure for animals that are awake only at night, or the vortex of time thus becomes a poem with an invisible subject like a novel that has no plot but wanders around, in which its characters wander around through life in what would appear to be an aimless fashion, or at least the show more author has no idea where his back is headed or will end up, just like life itself… " show less

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, socialist activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. At 99 he is one of the last survivors of the Beat generation of poets and writers. Little Boy is semiautobiographical and begins with his childhood shuffling between guardians, service in World War II, and Paris. A long life blends the old and the new. An excellent mix of Google and Barney Google. Facebook gains mention along with the World Wide Web early on in the book. It is an unexpected mixture of ages but rather plain. The reader falls into a routine the begetting in Chronicles. Suddenly the text explodes into a Ginsbergesque rant. He calls on the poets of the past as one would call on the saints. He show more has anger:

We’re the victors we set the exchange rates the laws the
treaties not worth the paper they are printed on ha-ha we’ll tell you
how to breathe all you fuckers trying to destroy us bombing the Twin
Towers you little creeps with your pajama clothes and weird religions
and who the hell was Mohammed Zoroaster Sufi Buddha-boy Omar
Khayyam Rumi smoking hookahs and kicking back we’ll take care of
you buddy after Twin Towers we’ll generate this huge national
paranoia allowing our guv to abolish liberty in the land of the free with
panic legislation

The words flow smoothly, sometimes violently, but always with meaning and life. The words seem alive. Here is a man, on in his years, not calmly telling his life and experience to grandchildren, but raging refusing to go gently into the night. Here is a man who saw the remains of Nagasaki and wants to remind us it can happen again. Powerful, moving, a lifetime recorded on a hundred pages. show less

A masterpiece of autobiography and breathless poetic free-form babbling. Thank you Monsieur Ferlinghetti for the wildest ride of philosophical and artistic musings I have encountered in 2020. A joy to read. A line runs from Emerson, to Thoreau, to Whitman to Ferlinghetti - they are not 'poets of loss' they are the great Yea-sayers.

Happy 100 years on the blue and green orb to an elder statesman of American letters!

Little Boy
by:Lawrence Ferlinghetti
2019
Doubleday
4.0 / 5.0

This book was written and published when Ferlinghetti was 99 years old. His writing style, stream of consciousness, either endears him to you, or turns you off. I love his use of this style, and is a perfect representation of him as a person; constantly doing, thinking, learning, evolving. Its Ferlinghetti in words.
This is a fast and intense book. Autobiographical. Beat Rants. Philosophical. I enjoyed this quick one. What an amazing mind.

I loved this book. I am sure it will not be to everyone's taste. It is classic beat stream of consciousness prose. It helps to have read widely as he has many direct and indirect references.