The movie version of 'Shadowlands' barely dips into the questions of Christian faith, its loss, testing and recovery, that give 'A Grief Observed' its structure. The same story is only hinted at in 'A Grief Observed.' What makes the little book so simultaneously wrenching and soothing, instead, is the sheer depth and maturity of the love Lewis found in his late marriage, his discussions of just how much joy was possible with a wife who was also a friend. Can a romantic tearjerker of a movie, one that makes much of the Hopkins character's authorship of the beloved Narnia books for children but considerably less of his theological side, create a boom in works that have, in recent decades, been treated as something of a cultural relic? The answer, oddly, seems to be yes.Ī bookstore staffer admits there's a faint element of bait and switch in the Lewis book exhibit: 'People get the books home, especially the autobiography, and they do say, Wait, this isn't much like the story.' The story of Lewis's late marriage was romantic and unexpected enough to have inspired first a stage and then a film version of 'Shadowlands': the intellectual 'confirmed bachelor' marries the American divorcee, first platonically as a favor to her for immigration purposes, then, when she is dying, finds the marriage has turned real and passionate. It's pegged to the interest in Lewis created by 'Shadowlands,' the Anthony Hopkins-Debra Winger movie based on the marriage that ended in Lewis's recorded agony. The current display, of course, signals neither conversion nor mystery. 'The Problem of Pain,' 'The Great Divorce,' 'The Screwtape Letters,' 'Mere Christianity' - they aren't exactly the titles I usually look for at this establishment, which, several months ago, had straightfacedly (and, as it turned out, incorrectly) insisted to me that no, they did not stock the King James Bible. It went onto that back-of-the-head reading list everybody keeps - you never know when you're going to need such a book - but I never expected to find it on special display in a Dupont Circle bookstore, in a crisp paperback edition, sharing highly visible shelf space with Lewis's spiritual autobiography 'Surprised by Joy' and a generous selection of the works of Christian theology that made him famous. Lewis's book 'A Grief Observed,' said to be one of the few really helpful books about the first awful stages of bereavement.

About five years ago I ran across a reference to C.

A grief observed readers edition