Here’s another book review. I liked this one. I was totally absorbed. Patti Smith, is of course the New York punk-rock legend from the eighties who has now written multiple award-winning books.
Background: I don’t know why I picked up this book. When I did a quick flick through it at the bookstore, it immediately sucked me in. Part-memoir, part-Beat prose, set in New York and woven together with a thread of pure whimsy (witness Smith’s love of sitting in a daggy café drinking black coffee and eating brown toast with olive oil) it ticked many boxes for me.
The gist: Smith meanders without rule or self-consciousness, tracing all the things she misses, including time itself. It reads like the diary entries that she writes on paper napkins and scraps of paper in the daggy café. Probably because that’s how the book was written. It’s a real time journey