the evolution of bruno littlemore by benjamin hale

But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in the Lincoln Park Zoo, falls under the care of primatologist Lydia Littlemore. Bruno Littlemore is a chimpanzee unlike any other chimpanzee in the world. Although he shows little interest in Lomax’s private life-a second marriage is dispatched in less than a paragraph-he is meticulous about the work, and he makes a strong case for Lomax as a central figure in the history of American music.Writers' Workshop graduate, Benjamin Hale will read from The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. He championed Woody Guthrie and Jelly Roll Morton, and organized Greenwich Village folk parties that Bob Dylan called “spiritual experiences.” Szwed is a sensitive interpreter of music and seems to have learned much from Lomax, whom he knew for more than four decades.

He dedicated the rest of his life to recording and studying American folk music for the Library of Congress and various academic outposts, in the process changing the country’s attitude toward its indigenous culture and laying the groundwork for the folk and blues revivals of the fifties and sixties.

By the time Alan Lomax turned twenty, he had worked as a booking agent for Carl Sandburg, travelled the south with Zora Neale Hurston, and recorded Lead Belly Ledbetter in Angola Prison. (When the pair do consummate, he probes her in disbelief, as “Caravaggio’s Thomas the Doubter does to the wound of the resurrected Christ.”) The lyrical flourishes can become theatrical, and, toward the end, the narrative gets baggy, but Hale’s relish for his subject, and his subject’s relish for language, never flags.Īlan Lomax, by John Szwed (Viking $29.95). He also becomes a lover-much of the book is a paean to his muse and mate, Lydia-but the story doesn’t stray into bestiality. Along the way, Bruno becomes an experimental test subject, an Expressionist painter, a Shakespearean actor, and a murderer. His hyperallusive, Nabokovian confession, dictated to an amanuensis, is the tale of “a first-generation immigrant to the human species,” encompassing Milton, Whitman, Darwin, Diogenes, and Kafka.

Hale’s exuberant début is the bildungsroman of Bruno, a chimp born in a zoo who forsakes his animalhood and ends up, hairless and human-nosed, imprisoned for a crime of passion. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, by Benjamin Hale (Twelve $25.99).

The evolution of bruno littlemore by benjamin hale