Description:
In Thomas Moran's first novel, The Man in the Box, his title character was a Jew hiding from Nazis in a tiny, hidden space at the back of an Austrian farmer's hayloft. In his second novel, The World I Made for Her, Moran once again confines his protagonist--this time making him a prisoner of his own body. James Blatchley is the victim of a freak illness--chicken pox, a normally harmless disease that can, on occasion, kill otherwise healthy adults. One of the unlucky few, Blatchley ends up in an intensive-care ward, unable to eat or even to breathe without machines. Numbed by morphine, his body ravaged by one infection after another, the one anchor in his life is Nuala, the Irish immigrant nurse who is assigned to his case: "Nuala means 'white shoulders' in Irish, but no one much remembers these old things anymore.... Nuala's small, not above five and a half feet. Her shoulders are thin but broad, like a young boy's and creamy white where I've glimpsed them." Nuala's shoulders may be thin, but it's her strength that is keeping James Blatchley alive. Though he slips in and out of coma, and when conscious, is able to communicate only by mouthing words or spelling them out on an alphabet board, Blatchley manages to develop relationships with his nurses, and he becomes fascinated by Nuala in particular. The little he knows about her difficult life leads him to imagine a better one for her--a cozy cottage in Ireland, a trip around the world. Eventually, however, Blatchley's fantasies become more intimate and soon the line between imagination and a real, if unspoken, love becomes blurred. The World I Made for Her is an intensely personal novel and one straight from the heart. For five months, Thomas Moran hovered at the brink of death, a victim of the same rare condition that afflicts his fictional alter ego. He was given only a 5 percent chance of surviving. The fact that he lived is something of a miracle; that he was able to take such suffering and turn it to the service of this memorable, profoundly moving novel is a testament both to the author's talent and to the power of art to make even the most uniquely individual experience universal.
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