The Shadow Factory

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Paul West, the author who hails from Eckington in Derbyshire, England, and has spent most of his adult years in America, now enjoys only a three-hour window of heightened fluency at mid-day every 24 hours following a stroke which robbed him of his use of language and almost all understanding; but he somehow managed to produce this remarkable book,this aphasic memoir dictated with great struggle and resolve --and with the help of his wife Diane Ackerman.
In her intoroduction she writes: "One day in 2003, Paul lay in a hospital room in Ithaca, New York, watching the sun's hallelujahs beyond the sealed window, and aching to go home. He'd already been there for three weeks with a kidney infection that became systemic, one of those rootin'-tootin' staph bugs older than sharks or gingko trees, and I'd camped out with him, lest he trip over several leashes and lines dripping fluids into and out of him. Struggling from bed, he made his way to the bathroom. The next morning he would be heading home at last.
"A few moments later he walked out of the bathroom and stood at the foot of the bed, eyes glazed, his face like fallen ice. Paul had had a massive stroke, one tailored to his own private hell. The author of over 50 stylishly-written books, a master of English prose with one of the largest vocabularies, a man whose life revolves around words, he had suffered brain damage to the key areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Global aphasia, it's called, the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt. He understood little of what people said, and all he could utter was the syllable 'mem'. Nothing more."
What a magnificent achievement this books is, and as someone who met Paul West many times on his visits to Eckington, especially in the 1960s, I find reading it very moving experience.
Keith Farnsworth