Volume 46, Number 4 · March 4, 1999
In the Dark Continent
By Rosemary Dinnage
Elegy for Iris
by John Bayley
St. Martin's, 275 pp., $22.95
Not Iris Murdoch. When an interview appeared about three years ago revealing that she was mentally degenerating ('I'm in a bad place, a very quiet place' was, I think, what she said), there must have been others besides myself who reacted with that thought. True, she was in her seventies, her mother had had Alzheimer's, obituaries for her generation were appearing daily. But it seemed that that particular mind and imagination could not be struck down: dulled perhaps, but not cruelly reduced. But the brain scan, her husband John Bayley was told, showed 'an area of atrophy' at the top of the brain. Just a piece of tissue that no longer worked.
Review, 2769 words
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