Little Boy by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: book review

Little Boy (2019) is the memoir of Beat poet, painter and publisher Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, born in 1919—now 101 years old.

He begins with his life as an orphan in New York during the 1920s, living with his aunt Emilie, who took him to Paris, where he spoke French before he spoke English. At the age of six, he had to decide whether to return to his mother, or stay where he was.

Ferlinghetti writes of the poets and authors who inspired him. This is a melting poet pot from Edgar Allan Poe to Jean-Paul Sartre, Rumi, Dante, and Proust. But it wasn’t initially his love of poetry that led to his career: ‘I became a poet so that I could get girls.’ It's also about his love for New York.

He writes in stream-of-consciousness James Joyce style, even mentioning ‘my Anna Livia twinkle toes’—a character from Finnegans Wake—and the river Liffey of Dublin.

He writes from 99 years of experience, almost in one breath, saying everything he is thinking and feeling. He mentions everything from Nirvana to nihilism. The Little Boy remains little, even as he is grown, never wanting to leave this earth: “I’m going to write everyone we’re staying forever!’ But, in the end, this is the literary version of his last will and testament. Or perhaps not.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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