Anne-Marie and Steve gave me this gift over Christmas. Anne-Marie described it as a story about a guy who was going through some radical brain surgery which changed him from a mentally retarded person to a person with the brain of a genius. I was intrigued! Radical surgeries from the 60s/70s? Sign me up!
Unfortunately for myself, I thought this book was non-fiction until someone pointed out that they were pretty sure it was fiction. I went through the same scenario with Life of Pi thinking the book was non-fiction. Clearly, if someone thinks a book is non-fiction, they will find the story that much more entertaining (for the sole purpose that some fantastical things can happen in fiction, whereas in non-fiction…generally not the case), but alas, all I was stuck with was a fiction book.
But in the end, the book was great. It followed the diary entries of the main character as he went from being mentally retarded to a super genius. The novel brought up questions about messing around with nature as this person surely had some grand intellect going on, but he didn’t have the emotional capacity to handle all these new developments and he seems a little crazy. On top of it all, they notice that the mouse (Algernon) who they performed the experiments on is acting strangely so there is also the notion of not knowing if your brain is going to give out on you or not and facing mortality.
Two thumbs up for this novel, especially if you go in there realizing it’s a work of fiction.
3 replies on “Review: Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes)”
I think the movie Charly is based on this book. I vaguely recallreading this book/watching the movie back in the day (Junior High).
It was a good book!
I’ve been trying to think of the name of the other movie of which this book reminded me. Finally, it came back to me – Awakenings!