Word: roald
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...ROALD by Barry Farrell. 241 pages. Random House...
...Roald is a muted account of her remarkable recovery, written by a journalist-now a columnist for LIFE -who came for a magazine story and stayed to research a book. In the process he became an intimate friend of Miss Neal and her husband, the English short-story and film writer Roald Dahl. As a comeback saga, Barry Farrell's book fulfills the function of encouraging the stricken. As a family chronicle it has an attraction as unsettling as some of Dahl's own bizarre stories...
Palimpsest. After Pat's stroke, Roald settled the family in their country house outside London. He set up a relentless therapy schedule and organized relay teams of visitors to keep the patient's morale up. Pat's principal enemy was despair. Her career seemed shattered. Her right leg was bracketed in an unsightly brace, and her brain was as faint and blurry as a palimpsest. She fished in vain for the names of common objects. Even Peter Rabbit eluded...
...with Roald as the sergeant major in charge of rehabilitation, Pat's normal functions slowly came back. With them returned her unique beauty and that combination of assertiveness and receptivity that marked her-even in her early Hollywood years-as a woman among exaggerated love-objects...
Farrell conveys Patricia Neal's feminine qualities with unusual sensitivity. His profile of Roald-a combination of intelligence, stoicism and optimism-is equally good. What Pat and Roald lacks is more of Farrell himself: his own feelings about these people whose lives he has entered, or some audacious perceptions about the events that make up the story-something, at least, to raise this skillful book above the level of the tactful neutrality of its own professional competence...