Darkness Visible

Darkness Visible: Memoir/Madness Audio, Cassette – Audiobook, October 24, 1990
Author: Visit ‘s William Styron Page ID: 0679400958

.com Review

In 1985 William Styron fell victim to a crippling and almost suicidal depression, the same illness that took the lives of Randall Jarrell, Primo Levi and Virginia Woolf. That Styron survived his descent into madness is something of a miracle. That he manages to convey its tortuous progression and his eventual recovery with such candor and precision makes Darkness Visible a rare feat of literature, a book that will arouse a shock of recognition even in those readers who have been spared the suffering it describes.

–This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A meditation on Styron’s ( Sophie’s Choice ) serious depression at the age of 60, this essay evokes with detachment and dignity the months-long turmoil whose symptoms included the novelist’s “dank joylessness,” insomnia, physical aversion to alcohol (previously “an invaluable senior partner of my intellect”) and his persistent “fantasies of self-destruction” leading to psychiatric treatment and hospitalization. The book’s virtues–considerable–are twofold. First, it is a pitiless and chastened record of a nearly fatal human trial far commoner than assumed–and then a literary discourse on the ways and means of our cultural discontents, observed in the figures of poet Randall Jarrell, activist Abbie Hoffman, writer Albert Camus and others. Written by one whose book-learning proves a match for his misery, the memoir travels fastidiously over perilous ground, receiving intimations of mortality and reckoning delicately with them. Always clarifying his demons, never succumbing to them in his prose, Styron’s neat, tight narrative carries the bemusement of the worldly wise suddenly set off-course–and the hard-won wisdom therein. In abridged form, the essay first appeared in Vanity Fair.
Copyright 1990 Reed business Information, Inc.

–This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Audio CassettePublisher: Random House Audio (October 24, 1990)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 0679400958ISBN-13: 978-0679400950 Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 4.2 x 7 inches Shipping Weight: 4 ounces Best Sellers Rank: #3,754,916 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #73634 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Memoirs
William Styron is perhaps best known for his bestselling novel, Sophie’s Choice, which was converted to screenplay and released as an Academy award-winning motion picture starring Meryl Streep. Many critics acknowledged Styron’s seemingly natural ability to evoke a sense of bitter, submerged despair through subtle understatement. The reviewers who lauded his work had no way of predicting that Styron would eventually become afflicted with a more personal misery, a depression so severe it would drive him to suicidal obsession.

Styron’s harrowing struggle with clinical depression is the subject of his non-fiction bestseller, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (Vintage Books, 1992). In a mercifully brief 84 pages, Styron eloquently demonstrates how the most brutal and debilitating stages of psychotic depression often hurl patients into an existential nightmare from which the only perceived escape is death (and according to Styron, this misperception constitutes one common, potentially lethal distortion of thought in depressed patients).

Darkness Visible opens with a pointed epigraph from the book of Job. This reflects Styron’s perception that like Job’s trials, depressed patients are beset by something inexplicable and powerful that threatens to destroy the fruits of their life and labor, the relationships they hold dear, and their very understanding of spirituality. Like Job, depressed patients struggle to find cosmological meaning in their suffering. And like Job, depressed patients who petition God to provide this meaning for them may only receive partial answers or worse yet, a silence that reverberates from an expansive, ominous void.

Darkness Visible Memoir Madness Audio Cassette Memoir Madness Audio Cassette Audiobook October 24 Copyright 1990 Reed Business Darkness Visible A Memoir of Madness is an autobiographical Darkness Visible A Memoir of Madness by William Styron Hardcover Audiobook Darkness Visible A Memoir of Madness eBook Date 10 24 1990 Publisher Random House Audio Publishing Group Darkness Visible A Memoir of Madness William Styron Darkness Visible A Memoir of Madness William Styron Audio Cassette IN PARIS ON A CHILLY EVENING LATE IN OCTOBER OF 1985 I first became fully 0679400958 Darkness Visible Memoir madness by Item Description Random House Audio Audiobook CASSETTE Book Condition Good 0679400958 Used book Previously owned and is blemished Cover rubbed w corner

Download Darkness Visible: Memoir/Madness Audio, Cassette – Audiobook, October 24, 1990

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