Good-Bye To A Genius

If you like reading good books, If you like biography or autobiography of amazing people, and if you haven't yet read the one by Christopher Nolan 'Under the eye of the clock', do read it. Both the book and the author are absolutely outstanding. It's so very sad that Christopher Nolan, only 43 years old, had passed away about 4 years ago in Dublin. He was amongst the group of people who defy life's cruellest snares and shine through with their creativity and outstanding achievements. When he was born, in 1965, in Mullingan, 80 kilometres east of the capital of Ireland, due to lack of oxygen in the brain, he was mute and therapeutic. The parents, Bernadette and Joseph, soon realized that had great intelligence and to stimulate his brain reading him works of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and D. H. Lawrence. Not all is literature though. Bernadette put alphabet letters in colour in the kitchen while talking to him incessantly, and his sister, 2 years older, sang him songs and played out characters of theatres or films. When his family moved to Dublin, he was in college with Bono, the singer of U2, who dedicated him the song 'Miracle Drug'. In fact, those were the years that Nolan reflected in his autobiography 'Under the eye of the clock' (1988), which won the prestigious Whitbread Prize. He wrote it thanks to a new drug, which stopped his continuous nervous spasms, and to the support of his mother who held his head steady while he typed, one by one, the letter keys of an electric typewriter, with a stick/pole stuck on is forehead like an unicorn. "I felt loved, truly loved, at home and in the college equitably, treated with absolute normality." he said earlier that same year to the newspaper 'Christian Science Monitor'. In the song of U2, Bono imagined Bernadette talking to her son: "I want to travel inside your head/ spend the day there/ listen to the things you have not said/ see what you might have seen/ the songs are in your eyes/ I see when you smiles". His way of writing, which is also shown in his first book, Dam-durst of dreams (1981), together with his poems and stories. His first novel 'The banyan tree' (1999) revealed a deep influence of Joyce, especially for the invention of new vocabulary. Also of other great voices of Irish literature, with the use of poetic prose. It took 10 years to complete the first novel, the story of a rural family through the eyes of the grandmother. "I was inspired by an old woman who lifted up her skirt to jump over a groove in a field.". His 2nd novel is not yet completed at his death. Some slanderers said that the Whitbread Prize was given to him for his disability, but one of the judges, professor of contemporary history, Ben Pimlott, assured: "All I can say is it's an extraordinary book." cited 'The Independent'. Tags:Nolan,therapeutic

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