Little Boy
A Novel
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3.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
From the famed publisher and poet, author of the million-copy-selling collection A Coney Island of the Mind, his literary last will and testament -- part autobiography, part summing up, part Beat-inflected torrent of language and feeling, and all magical.
"A volcanic explosion of personal memories, political rants, social commentary, environmental jeremiads and cultural analysis all tangled together in one breathless sentence that would make James Joyce proud. . ."
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
In this unapologetically unclassifiable work Lawrence Ferlinghetti lets loose an exhilarating rush of language to craft what might be termed a closing statement about his highly significant and productive 99 years on this planet. The "Little Boy" of the title is Ferlinghetti himself as a child, shuffled from his overburdened mother to his French aunt to foster childhood with a rich Bronxville family. Service in World War Two (including the D-Day landing), graduate work, and a scholar gypsy's vagabond life in Paris followed. These biographical reminiscences are interweaved with Allen Ginsberg-esque high energy bursts of raw emotion, rumination, reflection, reminiscence and prognostication on what we may face as a species on Planet Earth in the future. Little Boy is a magical font of literary lore with allusions galore, a final repository of hard-earned and durable wisdom, a compositional high wire act without a net (or all that much punctuation) and just a gas and an inspiration to read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I've always been off in my own burb in some suburb of consciousness dreaming away or otherwise goofing off," writes the author of this wonderfully effusive autobiographical prose poem. Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind, etc.), who turns 100 this year, offers a lyrical accounting of his life, both the "Me-me-me," with whom he identifies, and "the Other," who is his "shadow self." He also reflects on his private preoccupations with such broader issues as "ecological meltdown," third-world politics, and the "bad breath... of industrial civilization" what he refers to as a way "to find the universal in the particular." He provides vivid memories of his tumultuous childhood, shuttled between family, orphanages, and the foster family he eventually chose for his own, and his wartime experiences as part of the D-Day invasion. Ferlinghetti's prose pulses with the enjambments that energized the beats, whose work he published (famously, Ginsberg's Howl), and it's punctuated with such stunningly evocative metaphors as his recall of himself in Paris in 1948 as "a little like Conrad carrying Coleridge's albatross and the albatross my past" one of the numerous literary allusions that pepper the text. This book is a Proustian celebration of both memory and moments that will delight readers.
Customer Reviews
Little Boy
Simply stated: Awful
As an antique hippy chick, I feel it was a total waste of my time and money, which unfortunately went to a rich and famous old guy who has nothing better to do at this point in his life than to whine and complain. Shame on you Mr. Ferlinghetti.
Stream of Consciousness For Our Times
Beautifully written, impossible to put down, sad. It important.