Introduction

(Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. His untimely outbursts ultimately cost Lydia her job, and send the unlikely pair on the road in what proves to be one of the most unforgettable journeys -- and most affecting love stories -- in recent literature. Like its protagonist, this novel is big, loud, abrasive, witty, perverse, earnest and amazingly accomplished. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore goes beyond satire by showing us not what it means, but what it feels like be human -- to love and lose, learn, aspire, grasp, and, in the end, to fail.

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Excerpt

My name is Bruno Littlemore: Bruno I was given, Littlemore I gave myself, and
with some prodding I have finally decided to give this undeserving and spiritually
diseased world the generous gift of my memoirs. I give this gift with the aim
and hope that they will enlighten, enchant, forewarn, instruct, and perchance
even entertain. However, I find the physical tedium of actually writing
unendurable. I never bothered learning to type any more adroitly than by use of
the embarrassingly primitive “hunt-and-peck” method, and as for pen and paper,
my hands are awkwardly shaped and tire easily of etching out so many small,
fastidious markings. That is why I have decided to deliver my memoirs by
dictation. And because voice recorders detest me for the usual reasons, I must
have an amanuensis. Right now it is eleven fifteen in the morning on a drably
nondescript day in September; I am lying partially supine and extremely
comfortably on a couch, my shoes off but my socks on, a glass of iced tea
tinkling peacefully in my hand, and there is a soft-spoken young woman named
Gwen Gupta sitting in this very room with me, recording my words in a yellow
notepad with a pencil and a laserlike sense of concentration. Gwen, my
amanuensis, is a college student employed as an intern at the research center
where I am housed. It is she who acts as midwife to these words which my mind
conceives and my lungs and tongue bear forth, delivering them from my mouth
and by the sheer process of documentation imbuing them with the solemnity
and permanence of literature.
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