In contrast to many works, this book doesn't try to simplify grief, justify it, or dance around the issue with pat observations or cheery reminders. Instead, it dares to question those very tactics. Lewis allows himself to feel a broad range of emotions, including doubt and great despair. I love this quality in Lewis: he is one of the few Chrisitian writers who is brutally honest about his fears and anger. His writings allow that God is big enough to handle our toughest questions.
This little book is full of images and ideas that will stay with you long after you've finished it. Lewis takes feelings that you can't quite pinpoint and eloquently puts them into words. As I read the book, I kept thinking to myself "Yes, THAT'S what I feel too!" Misery does love company, and Lewis is excellent company.
As usual, Lewis is full of astute observations and points to ponder, but don't expect a bunch of clean and pretty answers. At the end, his grief is still very much a work in progress, which is definitely how it has been in my life....a journey.
Prior to the horrific trauma chronicled in this book (the loss of his wife), CSL had been what I'd call a puglistic Christian. His apologetic writings tended (although not exclusively so) to be a bit heavy-handed and simplistic. Take, for example, his early _The Problem of Pain_. In that book, CSL offers the standard philosophical arguments that attempt to show that the existence of a loving God is compatible with innocent suffering. But he seems to have no feel for the tragedy of suffering. It's a bookish exercise for him, and his ultimate goal is to win an argument. Many of his books are like that.
But not _A Grief Observed_. Here, for the first time in his published work, CSL comes face to face with a realworld (as opposed to bookish) situation that causes him to reexamine his earlier, perhaps too easy, too glib, Christian faith. His reflections about the terrible silence of God, the awfulness of loneliness, the feeling of betrayal, the ultimate reawakening of the sense that perhaps he isn't adrift in an indifferent universe: all of these are utterly authentic, and as such go far beyond his earlier work.
CSL's faith after his wife's death is one tempered with the hard realization that a great deal of the tragedy and suffering in life can't be glibly explained away. His relation with God is more dependent, more childlike, than it was earlier. CSL doesn't emerge victorious from the dark night of the soul he chronicles in this memoir. He emerges broken, but his very brokenness makes his relationship with God more genuine. And that's a lesson for us all to reflect on. It makes CSL an utterly lovable man, and it reminds all of us of the perils of taking God for granted.