Flowers For Algernon
(Daniel Keyes)
Written with tenderness and understanding, Daniel Keyes' book, 'Flowers for Algernon' is the tale of the eternal seeking of harmony between a brilliant mind and an over-sensitive soul. Its SF theme is only a pretext for a deep psychological and philosophical insight into life itself.
The book tells the story of Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68 who works as a janitor in a bakery. His life comes to a turning point when he accepts the proposal of a team of scientists to test on him a revolutionary surgery and treatment, bound to turn him into a genius, which has been only tried before on a laboratory mouse, Algernon.
The operation seems to succeed; Charlie goes trough stages of 'normalcy' and then reaches super-genius level, becoming even smarter than the doctors who invented the procedure, but a brilliant mind and the unlimited posibility of acquiring knowledge are not enough to make him happy. He is psychologically tormented by the huge gap between his mental and emotional age, haunted by childhood memories he is unable to understand, and hurt by becoming aware of the flaws of the world he is living in
Along the way, Charlie discovers love, tenderness, sexuality, anger and fear. He falls in love with Alice Kinnian, his former teacher, but, although he is now a brilliant genius, his feelings had remained 'backwards'. Unable of achieving emotional stability and hapiness, Charlie discovers, in addition, that his mental enhancement is only temporary. As his inteligence seems to fade, Charlie is caught into a hopeless fight to stop the decay.
Flowers for Algernon is written from Charlie's perspective, in the form of progress reports, gradually becoming more complex, logical and gramatically correct, giving the reader a measure of Charlie's intelectual, but also emotional evolution.
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