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The Love Song of Monkey

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"Neuroscientist and author Graziano has crafted a compelling fantasy based on a semi-plausible "what if." Imaginative, intelligent narrative...Twin ideas of forgiveness and mercy twist through this strange, moving, patiently wrought novel, making for a trippy but charming read."-"Publishers Weekly""An hilarious, dark, brittle take on post-modern medicine, love triangles, the dense emptiness of contemporary life, and the power of contemplative self-discovery. Part magic realism, part science fiction, part theater of the absurd, and part over-the-top, unrepentant spoof, this novel packs more into its few short pages than do most epic trilogies. Graziano has fabricated the rare kind of tale that the reader can honestly say ends much too quickly. Perfectly woven, self-enclosed, multifaceted . . . Kosinski's "Being There "sprinkled with a strong dose of "Frankenstein" . . . the kind of simplicity that speaks volumes."--Michael Mirolla, author of "The Formal Logic of Emotion"

"An amalgam of fairy tale, satire, science fiction, medical thriller, and soap opera. . . . It is difficult to fathom that a novel so brief can be so epic in scope. Inventive and deftly crafted, "The Love Song of Monkey" is a tale no reader will soon forget."--Eric Linder, Yellow Umbrella Books, Chatham, Massachusetts

In a surreal exile on the floor of the Atlantic, a young man faces his own death and his wife's infidelity. "The Love Song of Monkey" is a meditation on the simple, inexplicable, and lasting power of love, cast in the metaphor of a journey to the depths of the ocean floor. Precise and beautifully crafted, this modern fable is rich with humor and deep thought.

Michael S. A. Graziano, professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, is the author of the novella "Hiding Places" ("New England Review"), "The Seclusion Zone" (2007 fi nalist in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition), and "The Intelligent Movement Machine" (2008, Oxford University Press).

157 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2008

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About the author

Michael S.A. Graziano

17 books183 followers
Michael S. A. Graziano, PhD, is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University. He is also a composer and occasional ventriloquist. Love is his latest work of fiction published by Leapfrog. Others include The Love Song of Monkey, The Divine Farce, and Death My Own Way. He has also published popular science books: God Soul Mind Brain (Leapfrog Press, 2010), Consciousness and the Social Brain (Oxford University Press, 2013), Rethinking Consciousness (W. W. Norton, 2021), which was a finalist for the Penn-Faulkner award, and most recently, Charlie's Lab (Press 53, 2023). He has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and a backyard fox family.

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5 stars
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
Profile Image for Jacob.
84 reviews560 followers
March 3, 2014
An experimental treatment cures a young man of AIDS and leaves him immortal, which is fortunate because his wife and doctor, both convinced that he is dead, dump his body in the Atlantic and go off to resume their affair. As it turns out, an eternity at the bottom of the ocean with nothing but a weighted statue of Venus to talk to isn't such a bad fate. Gives a man time to think.

I found Gaziano's novel The Divine Farce at the bookstore on a day I didn't feel like buying anything (the horror!), but my library didn't have it and I had to try this one instead. No regrets. Nice little story, and (I hope) one of many good works from Leapfrog Press. Feels like it should be a Dalkey Archive title, but that might just be because it reminded me of Jim Krusoe's novel Iceland. Don't let that discourage you. I believe I enjoyed this one slightly more. You missed out, Dalkey folks!

Profile Image for Marcela.
15 reviews
December 10, 2025
Que libro tan bizarro y original, me gustó mucho el concepto y fue muy agradable de leer.

Profile Image for Heather Shaw.
Author 38 books6 followers
November 6, 2008
The other night at dinner, I got one of those great kid questions from my almost fourteen-year-old Hart: Why do people get old?

Hmmm.

We muse.

All animals die, I think, I say. And insects. Maybe not viruses... but that's nitpicking, so how about plants? Well, some, but not all. Aren't there some that live to be a thousand years old? Why not two thousand? Okay, so plants and animals have the same basic cell structure, but plants use magnesium (hence the green color) and animals use iron (hence the red). Is there something less corrosive about magnesium? We pull out the greatest lay chemistry book on the planet, Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements by John Emsley, and discover that magnesium is "benign," meaning it doesn't react with other elements. That might be the answer. Fortunately, however, the entire discussion is hijacked by the total wonder of the relationship between plants and animals (see the Oxygen chapter). Simply, the plants make the oxygen that we use, we make the carbon dioxode that they use. There couldn't be one without the other. (And plants came before the egg.)

Anyway, all of this is a rather long way of getting around to how I was reminded of a great new book. Scanning through Building Blocks, we read about iron, and how great portions of the ocean are without it and therefore completely barren. Where had I just read about that with such amazing clarity that I feel like I know those underwater deserts, I wondered? Oh yes, this little book called The Love Song of a Monkey.

If this book had a different title, it would be perfect. Just after he was stuffed into a suitcase by his wife and her lover (who was also his mad doctor) but before he was thrown off a motorboat into the Atlantic, chained to a statue of Venus taken from his own living room, that title was nagging at me. Monkey Man?

Here’s a guy, dying of AIDs and he’s offered the possibility of a complete cure, a better-than-new-cure, but only if he can endure indescribable pain for an hour. Okay, he does describe it:

Some piece of equipment turned on with a harsh buzzing sound. Then the laser beam hit the bottom of my feet…. If I hadn’t been held down on the table I would have convulsed like a fish and crashed onto the floor. No person could have withstood that pain for any hope or goal. It vaporized my strength of will. I didn’t know anything except my feet. The pain lay in a precise plane, like a deli slicer, the rotating blade taking microscopically thin slices one by one, starting from the bottom of my feet and working its way upward. It seemed that every virus particle was a twist of metal, a splinter that needed to be wriggled and wrenched out, torturing the flesh around it. Every bacterium had to be exploded and the shrapnel scraped out with a blunt spatula. Every blemish, every bit of scar tissue, cut with a microscopic scalpel and excised. This was not the torture of a thousand knives. It was six hundred billion knives and drills and lit matches concentrated into one layer of flesh.

Graziano is a psychology professor at Princeton and author of several other books, as well as articles published in the New York Times, Science Magazine, and Glamour blending fiction, music, and science. The Love Song of a Monkey is fabulously imagined and seriously considered and very funny. A kind of fairytale antithesis on the meaning of existence.

Now, if it weren’t for that title. It’s a little thorn. It announces itself boldly in the title, nags where it’s remembered during almost the whole book, then sneaks in at the end and squats there, black-caped, hook-handed.

Look, it’s only 152 pages long. It’s fantastic. It has a wonderful ending. Read it and tell me what you think.
Profile Image for Darcy.
529 reviews6 followers
December 7, 2025
This sat on my TBR shelf for 3 years so I figured I'd pick it up and read a chapter. Wow!!! I finished the whole book in about an hour with no breaks. This absolutely captivated me! I found it interesting how him and his wife came to similar conclusions by the end, despite their drastically different decisions and paths their lives took. This short story is capable of sparking great dialogue.
Profile Image for Karen Chilton.
Author 3 books
October 17, 2008
The Love Song of Monkey may be my favorite read this year. Michael S.A. Graziano does an amazing job of creating characters so real and vivid, they carry the surreal aspects of the story perfectly. While the book is short, I hesitate to call it a quick read. I plowed through it simply because I couldn't put it down, but then I went back and read it again. The Love Song of Monkey is rich with layers of meaning and stop-and-think moments. This is love as Ian McEwan might conjure it, something complex shared by deeply flawed people, and yet something ultimately beautiful. I'm glad to have discovered a new favorite writer.
Profile Image for B J.
100 reviews
June 29, 2016
This is a quirky book about forgiveness and enduring love. Short and sweet, unusual adjectives for science fiction, written by a respected Psycholigist in academic circles.
Jonathan is dying from AIDS and his wife has found an experimental treatment for a cure. Dr. Kack, name appropriate , is delighted to proceed. Pushing myself through this book because it came highly recommended by a friend , I was rewarded after about 1/3 of the book. It is not a book I will soon or ever forget.
Profile Image for Charlotte Barker.
49 reviews2 followers
May 18, 2026
This was a random and strange read but I did enjoy its oddity and it has served me well as a good refresh book
Profile Image for Sabrina Mazula.
32 reviews11 followers
February 25, 2025
A very strange, but thought provoking book. This author has a masterful way of describing complicated scenes and the human experience in relationship to their environment. It was beautifully written in the Devine Farce, and it continued all throughout this book, so I am very happy I chose to read more from this author.
Profile Image for Dennis Littrell.
1,081 reviews60 followers
August 1, 2019
A strange, surreal page turner

This is a fantastic novel, and I mean that in the old-fashioned sense that the events are fantastic. And surreal and deeply human. I read it in one fell swoop. It runs. Fast. It's a little crazy and you can feel Graziano making it up as he goes along--which is a great way to write a novel since you don't know how it's going to end. If you're clever and naturally creative--as Graziano is--some beautiful effects can be achieved. I once wrote a novel this way. You start out at one place: here Graziano, who is a professor of psychology at Princeton, starts with his protagonist dying of complications from AIDS. He is being taken to the hospital by his anorexic wife. He's in a lot of pain and scarcely cares whether he lives or dies. And then you end up in another: at the bottom of the ocean, in a museum, as a cat burglar called the Monkey man, and all the while you sing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.

I suspect that where Graziano thought he was going in the beginning is different from where he actually went. I also suspect that he had intended a realistic narrative but found himself constrained. And so he threw off the shackles and typed a tale incredible.

Graziano's strength is first in the rapid paced narrative and then in the great freedom he gives his story. Neither conventional reality nor scientific plausibility deters him from his fancy. The narrative is lean like something from James M. Cain or Cormac McCarthy, but without the strict adherence to realism. Graziano's story doesn't unfold as in a familiar tale or in something contrived to seduce the human psyche. Instead the story evolves as something reacting to myth or to the dream time, or to whim or fancy. Taken in retrospect "The Love Song of Monkey" (really a long short story), seems to be about the human predicament, as all literature must be. A man has done something wrong and is paying the price. He suffers and he learns from his suffering. And then he triumphs over circumstance and becomes something more than just human--a kind of demigod perhaps. Once he was vulnerable, then he was almost untouchable. Almost. Love kept him tethered to the world no matter how far he roamed in the great depths of the sea of his mind. And then he returned by happenstance to the world of humans and sought out the object of his love--the object of all the years of meditation--and found her more beautiful than she had ever been. And his love for her was unsullied and undiluted by the mundane events of this world. A kind of eternal and ethereal love is what Graziano's muse longs for and is what he achieves in the end.

People hurt one another and do bad things to one another, but in the end they forgive, and indeed find in their wisdom that there was really nothing to forgive ever, and in that state of mind they realize their love. And they live happily ever after, or they die in the state and in the grace of love--which amounts to the same thing.

Thus this is a love story, a bit creepy like a Halloween flick or something from a tale about the undead. As I intimated above, I read it in less than an hour. It is, all told, a strange page-turner, and one that resonates.

--Dennis Littrell, author of the mystery novel, “Teddy and Teri”
Profile Image for Pitt.
54 reviews1 follower
June 15, 2026
”But you have to consider the essential jaggedness of the human soul. It has its ups and downs. And that jaggedness is exactly what makes it beautiful.”

Such a weird yet wonderful story. I am appalled to see that it’s not actually well-known considering platforms suggest only around 2,000 people have read it. I want to urge everyone to read this alluring and curious story of a dying man who had been given immortality—a man with regrets, memories, and decisions he was left pondering at the bottom of the ocean.

The novel is not merely about loneliness but about devotion and endurance. Jonathan does not resist his isolation so much as learn to inhabit it. In the depths of the ocean, he turns inward—into meditation, reflection, and a strange kind of calm—choosing stillness over struggle.

What struck me most was not loneliness, but the extraordinary persistence of love across time and separation. Even in centuries of solitude, Jonathan’s devotion to Kitty does not dissolve into bitterness. Instead, it transforms into forgiveness, acceptance, and a quieter, more enduring form of love that survives without expectation of return.

The novel becomes less about being alone and more about what remains when everything else is stripped away—regret, memory, identity, and love itself. Jonathan is not simply enduring immortality; he is reshaping what it means to live within it.

Bizarre, philosophical, and quietly heartbreaking, it feels less like conventional science fiction and more like a fable about love that outlives circumstance, and a man who learns to exist in peace with what cannot be changed.
Profile Image for Marla.
368 reviews5 followers
July 6, 2026
4.75/5

This was just as good as The Divine Farce, though the tone and subject matter was very different. It reminded me a little of Piranesi. It was lovely, I even teared up a little at the end.

The author is a pretty impressive guy - he teaches neuroscience and psychology at Princeton, is a composer and a ventriloquist. He's someone I would love to have lunch with just to pick his brain. From that resume you would expect his fiction to be dense and opaque, but his stories are written with simple prose and big ideas presented with subtlety. If you peer beneath, you can see his knowledge of psychology and how the mind works woven through his narratives.

This novella can be read in one sitting. It's both delightful and makes you think. Highly recommended and I'm looking forward to reading more of his work (both fiction and non).
Profile Image for Keira Grant.
82 reviews2 followers
June 16, 2025
4.5 stars

The way Graziano's writing just flows from scenario to scenario in a completely believable way even though the things he writes about border on the absurd is so refreshing. He makes reading about literal hell on earth so easy, and I consistently get stuck caring for a character I know essentially nothing about. He writes like Graziano himself is going through these crazy experiences with the calmest, most laid back attitude and I genuinely admire all of his characters for their handling of the things they go through. Wish I could be like you Jonathan <3
22 reviews
January 28, 2026
After reading this and The Divine Farce I feel like the author really believes in the power of sensory deprivation tanks.

I enjoyed a lot of the book, but felt like the protagonist’s main motivation was a little unearned. And the last quarter of the book started to lose me a bit as I wish the main character’s thought process was more fleshed out like it was in the earlier parts.

Overall it’s a quick and easy read, and I really enjoyed myself for the duration.
12 reviews1 follower
April 17, 2026
Fantasy

Not sure what mde me read this but it is causes you to self reflect on life. Some of the imagery caused a bit of unease. Parts of the story was more like a psychological thriller.
Profile Image for Adrienne.
239 reviews
December 18, 2021
A weird little book that was somehow both hideous and fascinating at the same time.
Profile Image for Petter Wolff.
318 reviews11 followers
August 4, 2022
I'm a great fan of Graziano's research. It's cool that he writes fiction as well, however this was a bit lightweight and I did not find too many interesting ideas or captivating storyline.
Profile Image for Emily Keeler.
15 reviews1 follower
June 17, 2025
I was searching for something though provoking and I got something silly. Very enjoyable!
Profile Image for Gabriel Bierwirth.
37 reviews1 follower
June 24, 2025
I started this late at night and finished it in about two hours. I was sleepy, but I read it all the way through. It's just that good.
Profile Image for Nichole.
63 reviews
September 18, 2025
All this time I had been anchored to a shipwreck and hadn't even known it because my head was tilted back and I was looking up.
3 reviews1 follower
October 9, 2025
Real good

I really like how this is written. It's compelling. Can't be more specific. It's intangible. Highly recommend... why i gotta write such a long review?
Profile Image for Samantha.
201 reviews6 followers
October 27, 2025
Was a really sweet and fun short story. It did feel a bit bored at the ocean part but I guess that was intentional.
Profile Image for Kara S. Rice.
16 reviews
December 27, 2025
Delightful and intriguing read. The concepts, that are completely up to your interpretation, definitely sit with you. Graziano is a favorite.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews