A Grief Observed

Rating:
Summary: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Review: With that opening sentence, Lewis sets the tone for this amazing memoir. How many of us, in our sorrow-filled ramblings, could achieve this much depth and clarity of thought?

In the process of trying to understand his pain, Lewis demonstrates that he is, indeed, one of the greatest minds the world has ever known. And through this, we find comfort in the fact that even brilliant men succumb to their emotions. Lewis understands what he is feeling, but he cannot control it. He cannot change it.

He is, he writes, on a circle. Just when he feels that the pain is subsiding, it comes back in full force. Perhaps, he theorizes, it is not a circle at all, but a spiral. "But if a spiral, am I going up or down?"

Infinitely more affecting, in many ways, than the film based loosely upon it (Richard Attenborough's 'Shadowlands'), 'A Grief Observed' is one of Lewis' greatest triumphs.

Rating:
Summary: LEWIS'S A GRIEF OBSERVED
Review: Written in the aftermath of his beloved wife's death, C.S. Lewis's "A Grief Observed" is the great Christian apologist's literary attempt to make sense of the emotional and mental chaos in which he finds himself following that tragic event. A far cry from the scholarly analysis of most of his other books, "A Grief Observed" is in many ways a book of questions in which the author grapples with trying to understand why God would take his beloved from him, what sort of being God must be, what his wife is now experiencing in the next world and what all this means to his own faith and the rest of his life. Lewis, quite understandably, is not his usual self here, and the voice of "A Grief Observed" is not at all the same one of "The Screwtape Letters" or "Mere Christianity." Indeed, it is the naked, heartbroken pain with which Lewis infuses this book (originally published pseudonymously)that makes it such an important, vital, and universal literary achievement. Unfortunately, there are many (quite a few of them have written Amazon reviews)who seem to take some sort of ghoulish delight in Lewis's anguish, as though "A Grief Observed" in some way invalidates all that Lewis had written before, as if Lewis's other books are all irrelevant because he had not previously suffered enough to have written authoritatively on matters like spirituality, pain, and the afterlife. That is sadistic balderdash, and metaphorically kicking a great man when he is down. But there's no denying this is Lewis's most personal, heartfelt work, and its power is awesome. Ultimately, the reader will see a powerful mind and will "come to misunderstand a little less completely" one of this world's most agonizing puzzles, the paralysis of loss, and that in the end faith and God remain.