Customer Reviews

The Love Song of Monkey

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[Note: Nearly a hundred of my fiction reviews by great literary artists and others not so well known are now available in my book, "Novels and other Fictions." Get it at Amazon.]

This is a fantastic novel, and I mean that in the old-fashioned sense that the events are fantastic. And surreal and deeply human. I read it in one fell swoop. It runs. Fast. It's a little crazy and you can feel Graziano making it up as he goes along--which is a great way to write a novel since you don't know how it's going to end. If you're clever and naturally creative--as Graziano is--some beautiful effects can be achieved. I once wrote a novel this way. You start out at one place: here Graziano, who is a professor of psychology at Princeton, starts with his protagonist dying of complications from AIDS. He is being taken to the hospital by his anorexic wife. He's in a lot of pain and scarcely cares whether he lives or dies. And then you end up in another: at the bottom of the ocean, in a museum, as a cat burglar called the Monkey man, and all the while you sing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.

I suspect that where Graziano thought he was going in the beginning is different from where he actually went. I also suspect that he had intended a realistic narrative but found himself constrained. And so he threw off the shackles and typed a tale incredible.

Graziano's strength is first in the rapid paced narrative and then in the great freedom he gives his story. Neither conventional reality nor scientific plausibility deters him from his fancy. The narrative is lean like something from James M. Cain or Cormac McCarthy, but without the strict adherence to realism. Graziano's story doesn't unfold as in a familiar tale or in something contrived to seduce the human psyche. Instead the story evolves as something reacting to myth or to the dream time, or to whim or fancy. Taken in retrospect "The Love Song of Monkey" (really a long short story), seems to be about the human predicament, as all literature must be. A man has done something wrong and is paying the price. He suffers and he learns from his suffering. And then he triumphs over circumstance and becomes something more than just human--a kind of demigod perhaps. Once he was vulnerable, then he was almost untouchable. Almost. Love kept him tethered to the world no matter how far he roamed in the great depths of the sea of his mind. And then he returned by happenstance to the world of humans and sought out the object of his love--the object of all the years of meditation--and found her more beautiful than she had ever been. And his love for her was unsullied and undiluted by the mundane events of this world. A kind of eternal and ethereal love is what Graziano's muse longs for and is what he achieves in the end.

People hurt one another and do bad things to one another, but in the end they forgive, and indeed find in their wisdom that there was really nothing to forgive ever, and in that state of mind they realize their love. And they live happily ever after, or they die in the state and in the grace of love--which amounts to the same thing.

Thus this is a love story, a bit creepy like a Halloween flick or something from a tale about the undead. As I intimated above, I read it in less than an hour. It is, all told, a strange page-turner, and one that resonates.

THE LOVE SONG OF MONKEY is a wonderful, thought-provoking read. It doesn't fall into my normal realm of books that I would read, but it leaves me with lasting thoughts and makes me think about relationships in my own life. I find myself continuing to reflect on the ideas presented days after finishing it. THE LOVE SONG OF MONKEY pulled me in and I just couldn't put it down. I kept wanting to know just how Michael Graziano would wrap it up and put it all together. I wondered how the title fit with the book, and voila! MG does just that in a surprising twist in the book. This book is magical with elements of science fiction but through it all, you will find yourself laughing at times, wanting to cry at times, and looking into yourself for how you relate to others and where things will go in your own life. I felt like I was right there, experiencing the events right along with the main character in the book... even to feeling claustrophobic during the kwark-king experience (wondering what that is? You'll need to read the book!) Michael Graziano is an amazing author and pulls off a great read. I hope he continues to write for years to come.

Twentyish Jonathan is dying from AIDS. He has given up on life, but heeds his wife Kitty's pleading to try one last desperate gambit. He agrees to see Dr. Kack inventor of the top secret Kwark King cure to see if his life can be saved.

Dr. Kack admits his device is still experimental as the intense pain on human subjects has led them to give up and the tests on animals have all ended in their death. Jonathan is willing to try and becomes the first subject to make it through all the stages of the radical molecular modification that makes his body "unbreakable" in accordance with Kack. However, he never fully comes awake and acts like he is some sort of living dead. As such Kack and Kitty dump his semi comatose body into the ocean where Jonathan's love for Kitty sustains him while he begins the trek back to human civilianization starting with his soul.

Mindful of Spielberg's A.I., this is a fascinating dreamlike character study that insists the power of love enable people to do extraordinary deeds; as Jonathan did. His goal throughout is to return to his beloved Kitty that sustains him through the medical procedure and his incredible travel to the beyond and back. A whimsical parable that focuses on the strengths and weakens of humanity with the message of "To err is human; to forgive is divine." by Alexander Pope running throughout the deep story line.

Harriet Klausner

The Love Song of Monkey may be my favorite read this year. Michael S.A. Graziano does an amazing job of creating characters so real and vivid, they carry the surreal aspects of the story perfectly. While the book is short, I hesitate to call it a quick read. I plowed through it simply because I couldn't put it down, but then I went back and read it again. The Love Song of Monkey is rich with layers of meaning and stop-and-think moments. This is love as Ian McEwan might conjure it, something complex shared by deeply flawed people, and yet something ultimately beautiful. I'm glad to have discovered a new favorite writer.

Light and Charming, Love Song of Monkey takes you away and makes you want to sit quietly and think about the world. A blend of funny and dark, the story is wonderfully light, yet, at the same time deeply thought-provoking.

Graziano writes with a simple eloquence that leaves the reader feeling as though every word was in exactly the right place. An effortless read that captures your imagination and leaves you calm, satisfied and feeling thoughtful.

Graziano has created yet another timeless tale. The Love Song of Monkey takes a wonderful journey through the human heart, soul, and psyche. We see the cold reality of humanity, and the warm embrace of redemption. Graziano uses imagery throughout that parallels the psychological battle within each of us to overcome our own prisons we create around ourselves. Within, lies the belief that love conquers all...even betrayal and death. We are encouraged to understand the wrong-doer and rejoice with the saved, always acknowledging that a glimpse of each lies within all decisions. From the depths of the ocean floor, to the peaks of the city skyline, The Love Song of Monkey speaks to the human soul.

An epic quest within ourselves!

Kyle Dickerson

THE LOVE SONG OF MONKEY is a brief novel that is likely to be around for a long time, if word of mouth from those who have had the pleasure of reading it encourages a potentially wide audience to join the bandwagon. Author Michael S.A. Graziano happens to be a professor of Psychology at Princeton University and a composer of music, and probably these adjuncts to his considerable talent in writing help make this unusual, lyrical, challenging exploration into the mysteries of the durability of love so successful. This book glows!

Young Jonathan is dying from AIDS as his skittish skinny art director wife Kitty takes him to the offices of Dr. Kack for a treatment that appears to be Jonathan's only hope for survival. Dr. Kack has invented the Kwark-King, a machine that realigns molecules in living creatures making them impermeable to outside invasion and hopefully to cure them of invading organisms. To date Dr. Kack has used his machine on cats and mice but the degree of pain the machine inflicts during treatment has proven intolerable to the subjects and they die or enter a death like catatonic state Jonathan agrees to be the first human subject for the odd machine, sensing that his wife Kitty has connections with Dr. Kack. Jonathan proceeds with the treatment encased in a container that holds him stable for the entire perfusion of molecule changing energy: at the end of the treatment the still alive but the catatonic Jonathan is thought dead by both Kack and Kitty and Jonathan's quite aware body is dumped in the sea, anchored by an iron Venus sculpture. And there he remains, under the ocean, for years, able to remain alive because of the 'new' body and organ transformations - the monkey man of an experiment that actually worked!

Part II of the novel focuses on Jonathan's life beneath the earth's surface, a period of respite from the madness of civilization when he can put his life and his relationship with Kitty in perspective while observing the glories of life at the bottom of the sea. Eventually he encounters a touch of civilization and finds a crevice in the ocean's floor that happens to be a volcano of sorts: Jonathan is explosively cast a=back into civilization where he is mistaken for a 'found object of art' and eventually sold to a museum. In Part III Jonathan as art views the world now 55 years older - and among the thing he view is the aged Kitty (now comically Kitty Kack since she married the original Dr. Kack). The manner in which Jonathan encounters his life's love - despite all the passage of time and the acts Kitty has performed - reveals on of the more tender elegies of lasting love in literature.

Graziano writes with conversational ease that shadows the profound meanings present on every page, illuminated by a droll sense of humor and a magical realism type of style of writing that never leaves the reader unwillingly to believe this wonderfully implausible fable. This is a joy of a book to read and one that deserves an audience of readers who love literature and life - and still believe in love. Grady Harp, December 08

What if you were utterly immortal and indestructible -- and cast into an airless void under the sea? Where would you go? What would you do?

The question is asked -- and answered -- by "The Love Song of Monkey," the deliriously dreamlike, darkly funny journey of a young man saved from death by extraordinary means. Michael SA Graziano's otherworldly novella successfully straddles the line between magical realism and sci-fi. And it has the oddest love story in many a year (hello, Venus!).

Dying of AIDS, Jonathan agrees to Dr. Kack's bizarre and painful new machine called the Kwark-Kwing, which will apparently make him physically perfect and indestructible.

But something goes wrong -- Jonathan is left alive but completely immobile, and Dr. Kack and his wife Kitty (who turn out to be having an affair) think he's dead. They dump him in the ocean, anchored by a statue of Venus... but he doesn't die. Instead he lingers for years under the sea, with only his placid thoughts streaming by him. Until one day when he discovers he can move again.

So begins his journey in the sea -- he lingers in the hulk of a sunken ship (with an equally immortal cat and mouse) along with his Venus, and sets out on a serene walking trip across the ocean floor. His wanderings even take him into the molten heart of the earth.... and then on an increasingly surreal return into the world he once knew. But what happened to the wife left behind?

"The Love Song of Monkey" is one of those books that glides seamlessly from one genre to the next -- from meditative inner journey to sci-fi, from magical-realism to a witty tragicomedy. Few authors can actually do this, and Graziano's work ends up feeling like a surrealist novel by an earlier Jonathan Lethem -- smart, subtle and weird.

What's more, he's able to effortlessly slip into a dreamlike series of adventures that few can wholeheartedly dream of without being distracted by reality. With a feeling of bemusement and a tone of minimalist poetry, we follow Jonathan as he is blown out of a volcano, becomes a museum exhibit, and wandering the alien terrain of the seas with all its wonders. And his invincibility serves as a source for occasional humour (such as when a shark tries to chew on him).

If there's a flaw, it's that Jonathan's post-museum adventures seem rather truncated -- it would have been nice to see a little more detail about how he feels in a new, strange life. But the haunting quality of his search for his wife Kitty -- despite her affair -- serves as something of a counterbalance.

The novel also addresses the strange way that immortality and indestructibility might affect the soul -- if we no longer had to fear death, pain and time's passage, where might we go and what might we think?

Jonathan goes through such a journey, going from a grumpy ill young man (and self-confessed "jerk" as Kitty later describes him) into a creature set apart from the everyday world... except for the iron Venus that anchors him to the earth, and speaks to him in his head. Since he can't be harmed, he views his surroundings and situations with mild bemusement and intellectual interest -- even his wife cheating on him or his mortal hand being burned off don't evoke strong emotion.

"The Love Song of Monkey" is a strange, eerie novella with a lovely style and a philosophical bent -- a thinking person's quick read.

Graziano's fabulist allegory begins with the opening lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but perhaps the more appropriate passage can be found later in the poem: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all." And, although, Jonathan, the Lazarus of "Monkey," doesn't quite tell us all in this slim novella, he certainly tells just enough to spin a dark, quirky, and even entrancing love story.

Dying from AIDS, Jonathan allows his wife to take him to Dr. Kack, a quack physician developing "a machine that fixes the broken arrangement of carbon atoms" in order to cure the patient. The only catch is that the excruciating pain always kills the subject--or, at least, the patient is transformed to a state that certainly resembles death. What Dr. Kack doesn't realize is that he is busy creating immortal life forms akin to golems. (There's a fantastic twist to the plot, but I won't ruin it here.) Chained to a statue of Venus de Milo, Jonathan ends up at the bottom of the sea, meditating on his former life, developing "an uncanny sense of the space around me," getting acquainted with pelagic life forms, and occasionally terrifying deep-sea divers. But all these underwater entertainments can't distract him from his one true passion: his wife, Kitty.

The advertising for this book compares Graziano to Vonnegut. (It's usually unfair to pin a book's marketing on the author, but in this case he happens to be co-owner of the press that published it.) There are perhaps superficial similarities to Vonnegut, but the more apt comparison is to Calvino--particularly "The Baron in the Trees." Just as Cosimo takes to the trees to live a life of quasi-solitude and later becomes a prophet of sorts, Jonathan descends into the ocean and eventually resurfaces as an outcast known as "Monkeyman." (Or, to quote T. S. Eliot again: "We have lingered on the chambers of the sea / ... / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.")

But, thematically, Calvino and Graziano are worlds apart: the Baron's tale is of a man alienated from society in the Age of Enlightenment, while Monkeyman, as the title implies, is a hero whose love for a woman transcends his isolation in this age of alienation. The apparent cynicism and desolation of Graziano's fable can't mask its faith in the endurance of hope and the power of forgiveness.

Some call it New Wave Fabulist while others call it Slipstream--or perhaps even Magic Realism. Whatever you call this genre-defying subset of fantastical fiction, there is a nebulous but gratifying place somewhere between literary and genre fiction that delights lovers of the quirky yet profound.

The Love Song of Monkey creeps along the edge of sci-fi, especially with our involuntarily intrepid protagonist entirely reconstructed at the atomic level by the Kwark-King 5.7. But don't let the corny name of Dr. Kack's machine fool you: his machine can "scan the structure of your cells, their scaffolding, molecules, atoms, down to the quark, and fix the breaks, regularize the lattice, put in place levees and dams, cure you, safeguard you, and make you unbreakable."

Sounds like a dream, doesn't it? And, at first, emaciated AIDS-struck Jonathan--at the behest of his neurotic wife Kitty--finds the Kwark-King preferable to impending death (even though former "patients", including animals, were rendered comatose).

But there's...a catch. The Kwark-King, while promising virtual immortality, prevents the use of anesthesia. Because, you see, to use anesthesia would render patients an indestructible zombie. This is a problem because, well, the pain inflicted from cellular rearrangement is beyond excruciating.

Dr. Kack promises an "out" should the pain get too severe: a red rubber ball attached to plastic tubing that, when squeezed, stops the machine.

Ah, but the kalculating Dr. Kack--he's desperate for his machine to work. But either way, he's in a win-win situation because...

Nope, can't spoil even a smidgen of the squirmingly uncomfortable details of this amazingly delightful book.

Oh, but you want just a morsel from The Love Song of Monkey? OK, but just one.

The pain caused by the Kwark-King? Here's how an utterly immobilized Jonathan describes it:

"The pain lay in a precise plane, like a deli slicer, the rotating blade taking microscopically thin slices one by one, starting from the bottom of my feet and working its way upward. It seemed that every virus particle was a twist of metal, a splinter that needed to be wiggled and wrenched out, torturing the flesh around it. Every bacterium had to be exploded and the shrapnel scraped out with a blunt spatular. Every blemish, every bit of scar tissue, cut with a microscopic scalpel and excised. 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."

So why doesn't Jonathan squeeze that cursed bulb? Because the desperate Dr. Kack took it out of his hand at the last moment (and since a curtain separates the prone Jonathan from his wife, Kitty is none the wiser).

But don't let this horrifying scenario scare you away! I promise you, dear reader, that if you hang with Jonathan after his "reconstitution", author Michael S.A. Graziano will plunge you into the watery depths of contemplation and beingness, into the burbling lava of purification--and then soaring to skyscraping heights where acceptance and indestructibility congeal into a satisfying love song.

The Love Song of Monkey, in fact.

-- Janet Boyer, author of The Back in Time Tarot Book