The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

This "memoir" is dictated by neurotic, hyperintelligent linguist, philosopher, litterateur, scientist, and social commentator Bruno Littlemore. Bruno is incarcerated at the Zastrow National Primate Research Center in Georgia for killing a man. Bruno is a chimpanzee. Benjamin Hale's remarkable Bruno makes allusions to Kafka, Freud, and Milton and asks, during a scientific experiment, "Do I dare to eat a peach?" In a tour-de-force performance Robert Petkoff tackles Bruno's first-person narrative. With unbridled enthusiasm and pedantic smugness, Petkoff struggles through Bruno's earliest memories at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo and makes real and tender Bruno's falling in love with primatologist Lydia Littlemore. As Bruno engages in his first interactive conversation with a janitor in the research lab, Petkoff's animal exuberance is pure brilliance. A must-listen. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

October 18, 2010
An enlightened chimp goes on the wildest adventure since Every Which Way but Loose in Hale's mischievous debut. Bruno Littlemore, the narrator chimp, eventually lands in a research lab at the University of Chicago, where he falls in love with Dr. Lydia Littlemore, who, shortly after hearing Bruno speak his name, takes him first to her apartment (sex is had, much later) and later to the quietude of a Colorado ranch owned by a couple of odd animal rights advocates. It is in this environment that Bruno becomes a fully articulate and artistic being, but the idyll does not last: Lydia falls ill, and Bruno is captured, escapes, ends up in New York City, and befriends a dreamer named Leon with whom he mounts a performance of The Tempest before being forced by circumstance to return, tragically, to Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo. Bruno, having mastered speech, is quite happy to play with this new toy, going on philosophical riffs and speaking at length about art, and while his monologues are less tedious than you'd imagine, it's his quest for answers about the agonizing dilemmas of existence that is unexpectedly resonant.

January 1, 2011

Our evolutionary understanding of language is deeply rooted in the study of genetics; the few genes present in humans but lacking in chimpanzees are thought to be responsible for language. However, Hale's debut novel (winner of the Michener-Copernicus Award) forces us to reconsider our linguistic abilities in terms of love. Written as the memoir of the world's first speaking chimpanzee, Bruno, the story follows the extraordinary chimp from language acquisition to his eventual imprisonment. Highly intelligent and articulate, Bruno has an ever-expanding vocabulary dwarfed only by his love for the university primatologist. This is a love story. In his exploration of communication, Hale deconstructs human language within a larger continuum of communicative processes universally shared among all living beings. As a corollary, readers should be prepared to suspend willingly the artificial boundaries and taboos that exist between the species. VERDICT An ambitious, enjoyable, and lengthy debut novel; much will be written about its more controversial aspects, but Hale's prowess as a storyteller should not be ignored. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/10.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2010

So, a chimp walks into a bar...

Literally. At least in Hale's debut novel, whose protagonist is a chimp who, among other things, does not disdain a stiff drink or three, or even "a quadruple Scotch on the rocks, please," the aftermath of which merits ejection from a Chicago bar and a dejected walk to the apehouse down the road. Bruno is a chimp of parts: He has a knack for painting, and, he grouses, "the research center generously provides me with paints, brushes, canvases, etc." so that he can make a fortune for the place through the sales of what, after all, are a fairly scarce commodity—works of art produced by a simian other than Homo sapiens. Bruno plays backgammon, thinks philosophical thoughts, wanders the woods in Thoreauvian splendor and generally has a fairly good time of it, even though he technically is an inmate, confined on account of a rather spectacular crime he committed, one that Hale unveils only after many hundreds of pages. The notion of a learned nonhuman primate is not entirely novel; Aldous Huxley played with it in Ape and Essence, and another denizen of Chicago, Laurence Gonzales, recently did magic with it in his novel Lucy. But Hale's Bruno is smart and inclined to archness and irony, and it's a pleasure to follow his thoughts, darkling and otherwise, save for those all-too-frequent moments when Hale comes over all cute ("Cyrano de Bruno" indeed). The novel requires heaping suspensions of disbelief for those unaccustomed to the premise that a chimpanzee can write a love letter while thinking snotty thoughts about its less talented cousins, "naked, hairy animals, unenlightened, ungifted with speech." They have a word down at Tea Party central for such a critter: Elitist. And Bruno would probably cop to it, too.

A less splendid debut than the hype would suggest, but a book of considerable merit all the same—and of high entertainment value, too, as much fun as a barrel of monkeys.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from October 15, 2010
In this account by a chimpanzee who ascends the evolutionary ladder, first-time novelist Hale explores what it means to be human. Nine years into captivity after committing a murder, Bruno24 years old, hairless, with his spine straightened by bipedal standing, and his surgically fashioned, humanoid nosedictates his memoirs, having become proficient at speech, reading, and visual arts. His first name was given to him at Chicagos Lincoln Park Zoo where he was born, his second is taken by him from researcher Dr. Lydia Littlemore, who tests him and with whom he comes to share a home and a deep, and eventually sexual, love. Motivated by his love for Lydia and language, Bruno soon lives and functions as a human, becoming an assault on those who consider humans unique; his blissful relationship with Lydia spawns hatred. Like his protagonist, Hale clearly loves language, using words with precision (likely to send readers to a dictionary) and for play, as when Lydia, when happy, chortled up the engine to start her car. With its exuberantly detailed sex between species and its concept that human cognizance of death leads to superstition and religion, this novel is likely to offend some readers, while others will find it holds a remarkable, riotous mirror to mankind.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)