About this title: Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper, and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes, until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius. But then Algernon, the mouse whose triumphal experimental tranformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility that his salvation was only temporary.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Ex-library. Great EX-School Everbind copy! Very nice inside and out EXCEPT for school name stamped inside front cover. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 224 p. Bantam Classic. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Highlighting/underlining. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 224 p. Bantam Classic. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: Reissue
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam, New York, New York, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1972
ISBN-13:9780553274509ISBN:0553274503
Description: Acceptable. Mass Market pb. Acceptable condition-only fair due to underlining or highlighting or both; marginalia in pencil and/or pen on internal pages. In sealed plastic protection. 1984. Mass Market pb. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780553274509ISBN:0553274503
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
"I finished Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, which I picked up a few months back on some nostalgic childhood whim. I remember reading it when I was probably 10 or 11, I'm thinking it was 5th grade, and have been left all these years with the distinct impression that it was one of the best things I'd ever read. Not quite remembering the intricacies of the plot, I was curious to see why that was and if it is still true. It is.
I have said this before, although perhaps not comprehensively or concisely, but I will try to do so again while keeping it relevant to my reflections on the book. I am not an overwhelmingly religious person. I have faith, yes, but it's an unspecified etherial sort of fashion that you could call fate or destiny or kismet or any of those other things that imply that there is some plan out there whether you consent to it or not. And I can't help but feel that it was one of those irresistible fingers of fate that pushed me to read this exact book at this exact time.
The gist of the story I remembered - retarded man (okay, so it's not exactly PC by today's standards...) undergoes an operation that grants him with genius, albeit temporarily, and eventually declines to approximately his previous state. This progression is echoed and foreshadowed somewhat by a white mouse who had undergone a similar procedure. And this is exactly what you would expect a still emotionally immature child to take away from the book. Actually I wonder in retrospect if I read a perhaps abridged copy or only the short story because there were some very mature themes that would have been easily discernible to even inexperienced eyes. However, my youth was not one of censorship, so I'm fairly certain that I must have been exposed to the same words and simply took only as much from them as I was able to at the time.
Rather than being some rote account of a fictional procedure that impacts the intellectual potential of a man, Flowers for Algernon is instead a journey of emotional exploration, of human capacity, and of the potentials and implications of physical love. As his intelligence increases, Charlie Gordon (our protagonist who has just tortured us with stifled, phonetic, and unedited prose which serves to illustrate his naive satisfaction and ambition in life leading up to the operation) starts on a journey to make sense of the things he has experienced in his life thus far. He has suffered a disappointed and mildly abusive mother, a bratty sister, and the ridicule of people that in his stupor he has believed to be his friends. Guiding him through this are some scientists at the University (who are not terribly well developed characters, but they are tertiary and this doesn't detract from the story) and Alice Kinnian, formerly his teacher at a special-education facility.
Alice is a very interesting character, and in my opinion as a reader, it is a shame that we don't know more about her. She is a kind and compassionate woman who serves as a constant to the ever-changing spectrum of Charlie's mental faculties. She has taught him to read and write and recommended him for the procedure that could improve his abilities. It would be interesting to know more about WHY she chose Charlie, but the reason given to the reader has more to do with Charlie's motivations than Alice's - he is a dedicated worker eager to pursue knowledge, which later he says is a reflection of his mother's desire for him to be normal. Alice is fond of Charlie from the start and loves him throughout, even when the tables are turned in regards to their respective understanding and he vastly exceeds her brilliance. She stresses to him the value of who he was before the surgery, and in doing so shows him a kind of validation that no one else can offer. Because of this he loves her. LOVES her, and doesn't merely lust after her as he does other women.
Also as a result of his love, Charlie's shadow-self prevents him from becoming intimately involved with her until he is able to come to terms with who he was and exactly the gift she is giving him with her acceptance. I don't usually pull direct quotes from books, but this bit was so perfect, so completely and analytically human that I want to be sure to get it down:
"I don't pretend to understand the mystery of love, but this time it was more than sex, more than using a woman's body. It was being lifted off the earth, outside fear and torment, being part of something greater than myself. I was lifted out of the dark cell of my own mind, to become part of someone else - just as I had experienced it that day on the couch in therapy. It was the first step outward to the universe - beyond the universe - because in it and with it we merged to recreate and perpetuate the human spirit. Expanding and bursting outward and contracting and forming inward, it was the rhythm of being - of breathing, and heartbeat, of day and night - and the rhythm of our bodies set off an echo in my mind. It was the way it had been back there in that strange vision. The gray murk lifted from my mind, and through it the light pierced into my brain (how strange that light should blind!), and my body was absorbed back into a great sea of space, washed under in a strange baptism. My body shuddered with giving, and her body shuddered its acceptance.
This was the way we loved, until the night became a silent day. And as I lay there with her I could see how important physical love was, how necessary it was for us to be in each other's arms, giving and taking. The universe was exploding, each particle away from the next, hurtling us into dark and lonely space, eternally tearing us away from each other - child out of the womb, friend away from friend, moving from each other, each through his own pathway toward the goal-box of solitary death.
But this was the counterweight, the act of binding and holding. As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into the nothing.
And in the moment before I fell off into sleep, I remembered the way it had been between Fay and myself, and I smiled. No wonder that had been easy. It had been only physical. This with Alice was a mystery.
I leaned over and kissed her eyes.
Alice knows everything about me now, and accepts the fact that we can be together for only a short while. She has agreed to go away when I tell her to go. It's painful to think about that, but what we have, I suspect, is more than most people find in a lifetime."
And eventually Charlie does tell her to go. His capacity to love her disintegrates with all the rest, and though it hurts her, she lets him go. She denies her claim to him so that he can find the pieces of himself that were what made her love him in the first place, the pieces lost to and eclipsed by his brief burden of genius. So Charlie does go on, back to where it began, and finds a special kind of peace in doing so.
It's very bittersweet thing to the reader, who is by now crying out for some balance. Some way that Charlie can be kind AND smart, understand AND disregard, love and be loved... But this is not that story, and it ends much as it began. Which is rather the point, when you think about it - if someone could come to the kind of emotional understanding that he could love perfectly and in the moment, knowing that the end was looming, that even in living and loving together, we still die alone and then have the peace of forgetting that - well he has both learned something of infinite value, and received a blessing of fate in its loss.
I thought it was a beautiful and touching story, and creatively written besides. I worry, though, about what happened to Alice... and I wonder if I always will?"
"Charlie Gordon is a 33-year-old retardate who undergoes surgery that's supposed to make him smarter. His explosive mental and intellectual development quickly outpaces his emotional level, and as he discovers the truth about the world around him (i.e. how cruel people can be, how complicated life and relationships can get, etc.) he gets very sadly disillusioned.
After my sister (and roommate), Pati, re-read this book, she pointed out a few things to me that I hadn't quite considered:
1: A person with an IQ of 70 or 80 doesn't have the kind of problems Charlie does at the beginning of the story; there would have to be some other kind of mental retardation alongside a low IQ to account for his difficulties.
2: As he gets "smarter," his writing style advances, not only in terms of the vocabulary that he uses or the syntax (structure) of his sentences, but also in terms of the artful way he writes. Pati's point (with which I have to agree) was that the subtleties of writing (literary devices and techniques, like imagery or metaphor and such) aren't just a matter of being smart; writers learn those things through the study of the art of writing. It wouldn't just be automatic.
3: The book is supposed to be set in NYC, but it doesn't seem to be a realistic or accurate representation thereof. I forget Pati's exact complaints, but I bet if I go back and read the book again, I'll be able to sense what she means.
4: People aren't *that* cruel. Pati argued that the absolutely atrocious treatment Charlie receives is completely exaggerated and unrealistic. I partly agree, but I think (given Charlie's mother's own apparent problems) some people's reactions to him are more realistic than others.
In any case, a beautiful book that really tugs at the heartstrings. It was an emotional roller-coaster for me, and I LOVED THE RIDE!!"
"unfortunately at one point i accidentally opened the book at the last page and although i didn't read it, i saw the spelling mistakes and everything was clear, the mystery revealed and the ending spoiled. i'm not sure though whether i liked it or it was just ok. i enjoy 1st person narrative, diaries and confessions, so probably that's the reason i would say i liked it. and yes, my curiosity would have been satisfied if more psychological explanations were given, regarding the surgery and everything. but this is fiction, so i have to take it or leave it."
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