Flowers for Algernon

This is a thought-provoking, heartwarming, and at the same time, heart-wrenching story


Must read!!!

And then watch the good (not awesome but good) adaptation of the book - Charly!!!

Merged review:

This is a thought-provoking, heartwarming, and at the same time, heart-wrenching story


Must read!!!

And then watch the good (not awesome but good) adaptation of the book - Charly!!!

An emotional rollercoaster. It is rare that I lose myself to my emotions with a book, but I finished Flowers for Algernon fully sobbing. There is so much substance to this book, there's no way to put it all in a review. Not only do you feel for Charlie, and start to view the impatience of society and yourself in a different light, but this novel poses many philosophical questions: in particular, “what is my purpose?”

Heartbreaking and thought provoking.

I'm fairly sure I saw the film adaptation of Flowers for Algernon with Matthew Modine when I was in my 20s so I had a general idea of the basis of the story: a man with an exceptionally low IQ undergoes an experiment, his IQ soares, crescendos and then descends rapidly.

However the book really explored a much more interesting aspect of the character development: as his IQ increases beyond the level of everyone around him, his emotional level and experience struggles to keep up, if at all.

As Charlie Gordon gets more and more access to his mind and recalls (and accounts) his childhood memories, we see how badly he was treated and how heartbreaking his childhood was. The book is as much a psychological exploration of his childhood as it is a sci-fi - and for that it makes for a really heartfelt story.

There is one, large, aspect that doesn't track. Bare with me because I know Keyes wrote the book was written in 1966 (based off his short story written in 1958), but Charlie's emotional feelings towards Alice (and women in general) doesn't quite make sense.

Charlie had severe learning disabilities. He struggled to understand a lot of context in the world around him and we know that he has an emotional of a child.

If a child, a boy in particular, were to, suddenly, today have their IQ accelerated, their behaviour towards women and girls wouldn't suddenly be that of an adult man. Specifically they wouldn't behave like the men that expect women to pay them attention, or expect women to be sexually available just because they engaged in conversation. This behaviour isn't part of men's DNA.

Yet Charlie's character behaves this way when his IQ jumps. And yes, I'm overthinking it, but the fun thing about reading a great sci-fi is that it lets me ask more interesting questions about my world. And yes, this is rather woke thing to bring up about a book!

On the flip side, something I loved about the book is when Charlie does go back into his memories, it made me ask the question: do we have the ability for 100% recall?

Is it possible that we all have photographic memories but the majority of us can't access that part of our mind. If we do have the ability, doesn't that suggest that memory recall, for the most minute detail, is entirely possible - even to recall the details in something that was in our peripheral vision some decades ago?

If we do indeed have this ability, assuming Charlie's operation can unlock this part of our mind, does this mean we can potentially time travel inside our mind as those recalled memories become so visceral that they become reality during that recall.

Very cool stuff.

Then within the sci-fi and the character study of Charlie's psyche, we have the heartbreaking story of his childhood and whether it's possible for forgiveness all those decades later. Beautiful stuff.

This book is classified as a science fiction. That is not enough. It cannot be any more human, any more compelling a tale of raw emotions and feelings.
The protagonist is the subject of a science experiment to enhance his intelligence. His journey from a mental age of a young child to that of a genius, is the journey of growing up and finding the harshness of the real world. It is easy to understand the narrator as he goes through his various phases. The story forces the reader to ponder over the ethics of scientific proceedings. Draw your own conclusions.

This is a challenging book to review. It is a very engaging read that raises a number of questions of ethics and how we treat each other. What I think I appreciate the most is Charlie's continual message that he is human and has always been human, despite the scientists treating him as an experiment.

An unexpected gem. I felt for Charlie as he grew more and more intelligent and acquired more and more knowledge but remained an emotional teenager. I think this book should be read by everyone, simply because you can't help but make up your own mind about a topic that usually everyone agrees on: Knowledge is power.

For a full review click here: http://sffbookreview.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/daniel-keyes-flowers-for-algernon/

Would you trade the intelligence you have for anything else in life?
Better looks? More money? What about love and affection?
As the introduction to this book quotes Plato, ‘Would you rather be Socrates, or a happy pig?'

This book was written at first as a short story apparently and the author had the right mind to turn it into a heart-rending novel that would make anyone cry. It does not merely deluge you with emotions making you wonder why exactly you had to read this book; it makes you think and form opinions about what they are doing in here and about the characters in it. This is a book about which you could have a healthy discussion with your friend. There is a certain logic, no pretense, and the honesty maintained by the lead character throughout his reports is a page turner.

The story is about Charlie Gordon age 32, IQ 68 working as a janitor at a bakery owned by his dead uncle's friend. He gets accepted as a candidate for the first-ever experiment to improve his IQ. The story arc follows the changes in his intelligence, his emotions and social life. Written in the form of progress reports, we see the whole thing from Charlie's perspective.

I'll stick to three aspects of the novel. There is much more to it, but writing about it just ends up being aimless rambling.

1. Charlie's growth.
If you kept a journal as a kid you'd know - the ‘diary' I kept as a kid is filled with mundane details of the day. Charlie starts at the age of 32, but he as well might have been 8. Riddled with spelling errors and lack of punctuation, it is fun to read - only I have to keep reminding myself that this guy is 32. As the pages turn you'll notice an improvement, he writes more feelings than details of the day. The disillusionments, his realization of the appalling dehumanization of people with low IQ. Only when the fog clears he sees the marsh he is in.

For him it is like waking up from sleep to utter clarity and trying to figure out the vague dream which was his past - a past that doesn't really seem to want to leave him alone. Still he makes the best of what he gets and will leave you in tears at the end.

2. Imagery
Sometimes movies just won't do. Not always, just sometimes. Right after I finished the book I checked out its movie - couldn't watch for more than 5 minutes. I didn't want it to taint the images I had in my head.
Of the scared little boy looking out the window with his cheek pressed to the window
Of the look of disgust on the mother's face that sets him trembling
Of the innocent smile
Of the bohemian Fay in her house with no straight lines and of Alice's unsure countenance.
Of him overhearing Norma telling her friends that Charlie wasn't her real brother

3. Language and characters
Everyone is imperfect in this story. The egotistical Prof. Nemur, the horrible mother, the dad who just didn't care, Alice who allows herself to get hurt, Fay who's always drunk, the people at the bakery and even Charlie himself with the consequences of his varying IQ, his panic attacks due to childhood trauma. It is a mess. A beautiful mess.
All these broken pieces are glued together with phenomenal writing and imagery-by the end forming this exceptional piece of writing.

“I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only in places where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places”

It's a little like Forrest Gump, but better. Must read.

“Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.”“I don't know what's worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you've always wanted to be, and feel alone.”

This book is undoubtedly powerful and heartbreaking.

A really intresting concept, that a young man with severe retardation can be medically made into a genius. As always, science overreaches itself, although there is no moralizing about the dangers of tampering with nature or god's work. Plenty of good fodder about identity and different kinds of intelligence and the right of retardates (as the book calls them in its marvelously archaic way) to be treated like real people. Plot starts to drag in the middle but otherwise a marvelous read.