Scattered Shadows

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY APR 19, 2004

These posthumous memoirs, arranged by Robert Bonazzi, focus on the years between 1945, when Griffin (1920 1980) began to lose his sight due to an injury he received during WWII, and 1957, when he recovered it a decade during which he virtually lived several lives. At the book's center is Griffin's journey from a wanderer who "could no more fix my attention lovingly on God than I could on the wallpaper of the room" to a Catholic convert for whom faith "replaced logic, erasing the need for further proof." Around that center, Griffin traverses the emotional and physical distance between the implications of being legally blind and the reality of blindness, which "presented a thousand roadblocks." Readers learn how Griffin managed to raise livestock, fall in love and marry, and write the controversial 1952 novel The Devil Rides Outside. The author's previous lives had encompassed a scholarly devotion to medieval music and an activist involvement in the French Resistance. Black Like Me, his 1961 bestselling account of his trip through the South posing as a black man, was yet to come. Drawing on Griffin's journals, manuscripts and previously published work, Bonazzi's collection pays an almost too-reverent homage to a remarkable individual. As journal excerpts come to dominate, dulling minutiae invade. Yet Griffin's spiritual journey remains moving, and his way with words renders the austerity of an abbey as vividly as the cacophony of a battleground, an evening with a nameless blind man as fascinating as one with a renowned poet.