My Year Off:
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REVIEW BY ELIZA R. L. MCGRAW
When Robert McCrum suffered a stroke at the age of 42, he joined a community of patients who endure "insult to the brain" and fight their way back to the lives they once took for granted. He chronicles his own battle to recover in My Year Off. As both a writer himself and editor to authors such as Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje, McCrum is preoccupied by the literary, and books, reading, and writing are integral parts of his convalescence. His wife Sarah comforts him after his stroke by reading aloud from C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he writes that "Wordsworth, famously, spoke of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity. In hospital, I experienced memory as emotion recollected in immobility." Throughout his account, McCrum often translates his experiences through literature. His usage of books and literary encounters constructs a widened lens through which the reader understands his episode. Writing itself is privileged through McCrum's liberal use of his own diary as well as Sarah's. Glimpses of their feelings as the stroke changes their lives add a measure of understanding that hindsight sometimes elides. Sarah's thoughts in particular widen the spectrum of the stroke's impact. Her voice demonstrates the range of effect such an event has on the victim's family as well as him or herself. McCrum's affinity for detail codifies his experience for his audience with humor and perspicacity. He writes: "[Stroke] is like losing your wallet every day. Your wallet and your Filofax. The same sense of 'Goddammit!' and that sense of 'Oh, no!' -- all those telephone numbers to call, all those connections to remake." Simultaneously, he affirms his ordeal without facile resolve, reminding us that traumatic episodes do not always lead to aphorisms: "I'll probably not see the meaning of this event in my life for some years, but one thing is certain: even if, nearly two years after my stroke, the experience is beginning to seem just that, part of experience, still it has meant a lot." Eliza R. L. McGraw is a graduate student in English in Nashville, Tennessee.
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