Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
This volume brings together two of Paul West's best books: his critically acclaimed Words for a Deaf Daughter (1970), a nonfiction account of West's deaf and brain-damaged daughter Mandy at age eight, and Gala (1976), a novel about a writer named Wight Deulius who brings his handicapped teenage daughter Michaela from England to America for a visit. While Words is an account of Mandy's diagnosis and treatment, Gala is "the scenario of a wish-fulfillment" (as West writes in the preface), a continuation of the father and daughter's joyful investigation of the richness of life and its amazing possibilities. Ranging across natural history and astronomy in his effort to understand his daughter's handicap, West finds in Mandy/Michaela an irrepressible and unpredictable guide to the mysteries of the universe. Brought together in the same volume, the books also allow a unique look at how nonfiction and fiction techniques can be used to the same ends in the hands of a master of prose.
"West's Words for a Deaf Daughter and Gala are enough communication to last several lifetimes of contemplation." (Harvard Review 4-94)
"Words . . . and Gala are herewith on bookshop shelves again, in one volume, waiting to clasp you, a new reader, strike your heart, change some elemental part of your thinking forever. Some books do this." (Academic Library Book Review 12-93)
"[Words is] a rare celebration of the human spirit that will move thousands of readers. . . . West has probably never written with such affirmative eloquence as in this beautiful and moving book. . . . It is, without mawkishness, a masterpiece." (Publishers Weekly 6-15-70)
"The courage, wisdom, and bittersweet joy conveyed [in Words] should provide more help to those whose lives revolve around a disabled person than a stack of psychology handbooks." (Library Journal 7-70)
"West shines best when he dares to invade those close to home and heart. Gala, a novel in which he attempts to jimmy the lock on his deaf daughter Mandy's closed world, tells of their joint attempt to build a basement model of the Milky Way. From this domestic conceit West launches headlong into the more rarefied precincts of brain biochemistry, astrophysics, and linguistics, yet the sum is anything but dry meditation; his prose burns with the incandescent passion only a parent could muster." (Albert Mobilio, Voice Literary Supplement 9-92)
"[Gala is] wildly eloquent. Paul West . . . has style as full of exotic ingredients as God's bouillabaisse and, in its references to nature, as comprehensive as Noah's inventory. . . . He has thrown a mental party for his readers—a gala, a festivity that links two human beings to the constellations." (Edmund White, New York Times Book Review 7-3-77)
Library Journal
This West reprint contains the odd combination of a 1970 nonfiction account of the novelist's relationship with his deaf daughter and a fictional treatment of a more intricate but similar story West released six years later ( LJ 2/1/77), which has a writer and a deaf girl as the principal characters. LJ 's reviewer highly praised Words , saying, ``The courage, wisdom, and bittersweet joy conveyed should provide more help to those whose lives revolve around a disabled person than a stack of psychology books'' ( LJ 7/70). A worthy volume for its fact and fiction.