Patti Smith's incomplete and sometimes thrilling memoirs

After The Year of the Monkey and ofSome kidsClub Editor publishes a new book by Patti Smith: The bread of angelsLike the others, this is a memoir, but unlike the others, this one is not dedicated to any specific period in the author's life; rather, it recounts her entire life. The title is a reference to "unpremeditated acts of kindness," but it comes from Psalm 78, which speaks of the food that falls from heaven and satisfies the Israelites. In the Psalm, however, after gorging themselves, they see how God takes the lives of all young men in an equally haphazard way. If it isn't, it seems like a premonition.

The volume opens with several chapters dedicated to the author's childhood, which foreshadow the character she will become as an adult. She is the daughter of a poor family, but both her mother and father have profound cultural and spiritual concerns: in a spiritual crisis, her mother takes her children to preach as Jehovah's Witnesses. Moving frequently, playing dangerous games in a dirty vacant lot that end with a piece of glass embedded in her eyebrow, constant (and serious) illnesses, and the death of a childhood friend are the backdrop against which the person who would later become rock star Patti Smith took shape. A poor but beautiful landscape: something like an Aki Kaurismäki version of Pippi Longstocking.

The adventure novel that was her childhood ends more or less abruptly when Smith tells her family she is pregnant, that she cannot care for the child, and that she will drop out of university to dedicate herself to being an artist.

Counterculture and the Canon

Her arrival in New York is dazzling: after giving her daughter up for adoption, she meets Robert Mapplethorpe and immerses herself in the bohemian scene of the 20th-century capital. However, Smith doesn't delve deeply into her stay at the Chelsea Hotel. She explains, rather hastily, the formation of the band with which she would record her first album. She doesn't explore in much detail the transition from considering herself a writer to recording an album that became a modern music classic, but she does allow us to sense the creative energy that permeated that environment: Mapplethorpe, Velvet Underground, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, are some of Smith's collaborators and mentors.

In the episode about the recording of Horsas He explains an idea that is fundamental to understanding his career: "While the band was finishing the songs for recording, I reflected on our mission, thinking about what, raw as we were, we could offer to our cultural canon." In other words, the counterculture of the time wasn't born as an amendment to the idea of a canon, but as a contribution. That's how it connects Horsas with Coltrane, Pollock, or Ginsberg.

The most interesting part of the book, from a literary point of view, is the years she lives with her husband, Fred Smith, and their children, away from the public eye. Unfortunately, she struggles to delve into the experiences of that time and rushes through the years leading up to her husband's death. A death that, incidentally, as the psalm that gives the book its title foretells, is just one more in a period when AIDS, above all, is claiming many of her contemporaries.

From there, the narrative continues in a very uneven fashion, explaining her return to the stage and the recording studio, the death of her parents, the discovery of who her real father is, and occasionally, a rather psychedelic passage. The trips to France are not surprising, however: visits to Père Lachaise Cemetery and stays in a chapel on an estate in the south of France (these things are never in Clichy) owned by friends, where he will have to finish writing the book. A classic in the American imagination: Europe reduced to a vineyard in the south of France where one can write books.

In short, these are incomplete memoirs (that's not a flaw), at times thrilling, which narratively don't accompany the main character in moments of pause and reflection, and which, in terms of cultural discourse, speak more to the idolatry he feels for Rimbaud not of its own role in North American and, by extension, Western culture. But perhaps that would be asking for the moon.