“Flowers for Algernon” Daniel Keyes (1966) Review | Forgiveness and salvations

★★★★★ What is happiness? I am certain he was happy when surrounded by all the wonders of the world and knowledge, but if life is a cycle, nothing is permanent. Forgiveness and salvations.

🔽 log 🔽
Flowers for Algernon 
Daniel Keyes, 1966
256 pages
Read in 2026.02

🔽 Book review and notes 🔽

This book is too personal and can't help to think in my surrounding situation, but let's try not to be objective.

This book asks the big question, what is happiness?
As Charlie gets smarter, a girl at the bakery mentions the garden of Eden, that God doesn't want us to go beyond what's given to us, quite frankly, she's saying it's wrong to be smart.

Was he happy that he got a lot smarter than everyone around him, was it a good thing?
I think he was happy, to be surrounded by the wonders of the world, he absorbed all the knowledge that almost all of us cannot reach.
Then he struggles as he lose the super power, but like any of us who get old and old enough to go sinile, I don't think it's a bad thing to return to our simple selves, it's a cycle.
You gain something, you also eventually lose that something.

Knowledge is power, sometime too powerful and harmful if we only focus on the power, but like the cycle of life, knowledge in a person is temporary, and he understood it, he decided to live every stage fully.

It also made me thing of one's role in a community, and coming from the US where they focus on the individualism, it's even more interesting that he finds peach in the given role.

Then, at the end, was the mother a bad person?
Was she bad to wish he was "normal"? 
It's easy to say she was evil if you have been taught correctly at school, but if you have never experienced the desperation to realise that your child would never have "normal" conversations and "normal" work like other kids, you cannot dismiss her as bad.
She forgot to love her son, she was too focused on her unhappy self, the despair made her blind.

In the end, we are all selfish, but this book is a reminder that we always mean well and we don't want to hurt people around us, it's just it's difficult to juggle it all.
Glad that this book is full of salvations and forgiveness.
 

🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽

●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●

Flowers For Algernon

●●● Amazon.co.uk (UK) ●●●
Flowers For Algernon: A Modern Literary Classic

●●● Amazon.it (Italy) ●●●
Fiori per Algernon (italiano)