Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories - Hardcover

Bayley, John

3.67

156 ratings by Goodreads

9780715629321: Iris and the Friends: A Year of Memories

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0715629328 ISBN 13: 9780715629321

Publisher: Duckworth, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Very Good, 1st Edition, Duckworth 1998. Royal 8vo. 208pp. Very good clean tight sound square, no bookplate, ownership inscription, no further marks of any kind. In very good bright gilt lettered black cloth together with original unclipped portrait pictorial dustwrapper rubbed to head of spine.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Novelist and thinker Iris Murdoch died on 8 February 1999 after living for three years with Alzheimer's disease. Her husband, novelist and academic John Bayley, had previously written movingly of the impact of her illness in Iris: A Memoir.

Iris and the Friends tells of the final year of Murdoch's life, when she was visited more by her own imaginary "friends" than by the exigencies of real life. It brings the story through Bayley's increasingly precarious hold on present reality, to his own breakdown, Murdoch's final happy weeks in a home for the terminally ill and finally her quiet death. Although ostensibly a sequel, it is more an exploration of Bayley's new friends: the memories that were sparked off precisely as Murdoch lost her own--of his childhood, army years, first loves and, of course, their marriage.

But there are other "friends". At one point Bayley writes: "The old Eng. Lit. again. I taught it for nearly fifty years and feel detached from it now." Yet 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, Dostoevsky, Thurber, James, Lawrence, Woolf or Murdoch. Sometimes Iris appears to respond to the shared literary in-jokes, but more often the pair become "two animals pushing together, nudging and grooming each other, grunting together as they bask in a mutual doze."

It's an incredibly intimate glimpse into what should be a personal life, but as Bayley observes tellingly: "There is a surreal sense in which Alzheimer's has turned Iris herself into art. She is my Iris no longer, but a person in the public domain." --Alan Stewart

Review:

'This is the greatest love story of our age; incomparable' The Observer on Iris: A Memoir

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.