Sonia’s Reviews > Year of the Monkey > Status Update

this is what I know. sam is dead. my brother is dead. my mother is dead. my father is dead. my husband is dead. my cat is dead. & my dog who was dead in '57 is still dead. yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. maybe tomorrow. a tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows. but getting back to the moment, which is already gone, I was alone (...) suddenly left holding the bag.

I just sighed. was it all a dream? was everything a dream? beginning with the dream motel straight on thorough all the monkey-induced mischief. I was in the middle of this circular rumination when I sensed that I was not alone. making a quick scan of the bar, I spotted him. I hadn't noticed him when I came in, but he was there all right, sitting in semi-darkness at a corner table tossing folded bits from his wallet.

it was a third-rate café bar. that is to say it had a degree of anonymity that concurrently camouflaged and exposed any questionable goings-on. no place to hide within it colorless walls, but on the other hand, few would come across it, an anonymous-looking joint on a side street just off the boards. hard-luck joes, bookies and stoles, the last vestiges of an era only a dirty cop might recognize.

the cock of the new year had arrived, a hideous thing with puffed chest and feathers the color of the sun. too late too late too late, he crowed. the year of the monkey was over, and the fire rooster, waiting in the wings, made a grandiose entrance. I skipped the lunar year parade though I watched the fireworks from my stoop.

outside, the rain ceased but high winds remained. and what was truth remained the truth. it was the last day of the year of the monkey and the golden cockerel was crowing, for the insufferable yellow-haired confidence man had been sworn in, with a bible no less, and Moses and Jesus and buddha and mohammed seemed somewhere else entirely.

(...) and we watched the terrible soap opera called the American election unfold on a large-screen tv. one by one each stumbled off into dawn. the bully bellowed. silence ruled. twenty-four percent of the population had elected the worst of ourselves to represent the other seventy-six percent. all hail our American apathy, all hail the twisted wisdom of the electoral college.

this small realization intrigued me. the writer develops independent characters who live their own life and write under their own names, no less than seventy-five of them, each with a separate hat and coat. So how can we know the true Pessoa? the answer lies in front of us, his own books, an idiosyncratic library perfectly preserved.