Author: John Bayley File Type: pdf A timeless work that will bring healing to anyone dealing with the loss of a loved one.John Bayley began writing Iris and Her Friends, a companion to the New York Times bestseller Elegy for Iris, late at night while his wife, the beloved novelist Iris Murdoch, succumbed to Alzheimers Disease. As Iris was losing her memory, Bayley was flooded with vivid recollections of his own. In lyrical reverie, Bayley recreates the unforgettable scenes of his youth, from his birth to a civil servant in colonial India to his long romance with Iris and its heartbreaking end. This is the transcendent work of a brilliant man, whose examination of the tragedies and joys of his own life will give readers great healing insight. John Bayleys Iris and Her Friends is nothing less than a classic of true love and sorrow. Love makes every beautifully formed sentence, every generously shared moment, shimmer and sing.Donna Seaman, Los Angeles Times Book ReviewAmazon.com ReviewNovelist Iris Murdoch died in 1999 after a three-year battle with Alzheimers disease. Her husband, writer John Bayley, who wrote movingly of the impact of her illness in Elegy for Iris, tells in this book of the final year of his wifes life, when she was visited more by her own imaginary friends than by the exigencies of real life. In Iris and Her Friends, Bayley recalls his own increasingly precarious hold on reality and subsequent breakdown, Murdochs final happy weeks in a home for the terminally ill, and finally her quiet death. Although closely linked to Elegy, Iris and Her Friends focuses more on Bayleys experience of Murdochs illness the memories he discovered just as his wife lost her own--of his childhood, his army years and first loves, and of their long marriage. One of Bayleys friends is a subject he holds dear The old Eng. Lit. again. I taught it for nearly fifty years and feel detached from it now. Nonetheless, literature emerges here as the one remaining constant in his life. Scarcely two pages go by without a reference, almost involuntary, to Hardy, Coleridge, Austen, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Thurber, James, Lawrence, Woolf--or Murdoch. Sometimes Murdoch appears to respond to the shared literary in-jokes, but more often the pair are like two animals pushing together, nudging and grooming each other, grunting together as they bask in a mutual doze. This is an incredibly intimate glimpse into a personal life, but as Bayley tellingly observes There is a surreal sense in which Alzheimers has turned Iris herself into art. She is my Iris no longer, but a person in the public domain. --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.ukFrom Publishers WeeklyBayley scored an unexpected hit with last years eloquent and deeply affecting Elegy for Iris, in which he spoke of his life with the celebrated novelist Iris Murdoch, both before and after she developed the Alzheimers disease that finally, after five long years, killed her in February 1999. This new memoir appears in the wake of Murdochs death and takes brief note of it, though much of it had been written by Bayley, while propped up beside his sleeping wife, in their last, desperate months together. As before, the details of how a loving mate deals with a complete mental withdrawal are at once horrific and touching, and blessed with Bayleys awkward grace. There is nothing much new to add to Elegy in the writing about their strange togetherness in the face of utmost adversity, however, and the title is more than a little misleading. What is new is the flights of memory that prompt Bayley to feel his way back to his own childhood and army days. The closeness and delicacy of his recall is almost hallucinatoryAhe brings long-forgotten prewar English landscapes and ways of life back with astounding vividnessAand his accounts of wartime and peacetime life in the British army are as hilariously observant as the best of Evelyn Waugh, though quite without the undertone of bitter rancor. Bayley is a splendid memoirist, who has now said all that needs to be said about Murdoch. How about a new volume that is just about him? If this is anything to go by, it would be as compelling in its way as Angelas Ashes. (Nov.) 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: John Harwood File Type: pdf Winter 2014, No. 54, Pages 6-33Posted Online March 7, 2014. div (doi10.1162GREY_a_00134)