A Grief Observed - Softcover

Lewis, C.S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 057129068X ISBN 13: 9780571290680

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2013

Synopsis

A Grief Observed comprises the reflections of the great scholar and Christian on the death of his wife after only a few short years of marriage. Painfully honest in its dissection of his thoughts and feelings, this is a book that details his paralysing grief, bewilderment and sense of loss in simple and moving prose.

Invaluable as an insight into the grieving process just as much as it is as an exploration of religious doubt, A Grief Observed will continue to offer its consoling insights to a huge range of readers, as it has for over fifty years.

'A classic of the genre, a literary answer to the pain of loss.' Robert McCrum

About this title

Review:

C.S. Lewis joined the human race when his wife, Joy Gresham, died of cancer. Lewis, the Oxford don whose Christian apologetics make it seem like he's got an answer for everything, experienced crushing doubt for the first time after his wife's tragic death. A Grief Observed contains his epigrammatic reflections on that period: "Your bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high," Lewis writes. "Nothing will shake a man--or at any rate a man like me--out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself." This is the book that inspired the film Shadowlands, but it is more wrenching, more revelatory, and more real than the movie. It is a beautiful and unflinchingly honest record of how even a stalwart believer can lose all sense of meaning in the universe, and how he can gradually regain his bearings. --Michael Joseph Gross

From the Publisher:

C. S. Lewis' classic confession of near-despair and rediscovered faith probes the issues of life, death, and hope in the midst of loss.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 057129068X
• ISBN 13: 9780571290680
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64