The Language of Water: A Woman's Struggle With Systemic Lupus Erythemotosus

By Jude Clarke

A painter's life and work, under constant ambush by the disease Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, is described with an insistence on love, memory, and creativity. Unique both as autobiography and as... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1894345444
• ISBN13: 9781894345446
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Thistledown Pr Ltd
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

enlightening and encouraging

When I finished Language of Water, I couldn't wait to recommend it to others to read. It was enlightening, encouraging, and creative. The book captured my attention at the beginning with the symbolic narrative of the wolves and the wildfire. By inserting the small symbolic narratives at times when Clarke was battling, fearing, or just thinking about the disease gave me a mental image and an emotional feeling of her life with lupus through the actions of the wolves and the wildfire. This alternative, creative method informed and educated me of the endless battle with lupus and how acceptance, understanding, and life are still possible.I also enjoyed the paintings scattered within the book. Clarke explains how she created some of her painting. I am now curious to experiment with some of her techniques she used, particularly, I am interested in her style while in France.I believe Language of Water is an excellent book for anyone to read and a mandatory book to read if the reader or someone the reader is close to has any type of illness. The book gives hope and suggestion to the reader, and as a nurse, I will be recommending this book to my future clients.

Facing the challenge

The Language of Water is a beautifully written, candid and honest autobiographical account of a woman who is facing the daily challenges of living with chronic illness. Through her eyes as an artist, she paints a very vivid account of not only the trials of sickness, but, within her life the beauty and love she experiences. Sustaining such illness, she does so with courage, not self pity, not forgetting life around her in the process. The information she provides in giving account of the various stages in her condition is useful not only for sufferers of lupus, but for anyone dealing situations they are not always in control of, such as disease, chronic fatigue, and the like. She demonstrates the importance of good care and information in coping and managing illness, while living a life as full as is possible in such circumstances. An excellent read, with pictures of her beautiful paintings within. Thank you Jude.

Of Wolves, Swimming, Painting and Jazz

Spanning the period 1958 to 2001, Jude Clarke's The Language of Water is a discontinuously structured narrative that evokes human strength and the import of community.A diagnosis of Systemic Lupus Erythematosus and the painter's response to flares and treatments is one significant strand in a narrative that beautifully evokes the artistic process (a bathtub in Edinburgh as a solution to texture), the recuperative and meditative nature of night swimming and the impact other humans can bring to the coping process.While the author makes it painfully clear that Lupus is a solitary disease, nevertheless the presence of a mother, a partner and siblings, as textually arranged, offer a united defence, separating the disease into more manageable strands of experience.The recuperation of self through painting and swimming is also magnificently wrought in the text's demonstration of a jazz-like improvisation at its close: a juxtapositioning of the author's own words, a quotation from John Lent's "The Real World", a intuited reworking of Raymond Carver's "A Late Fragment" and an existential celebration in "It's an improvisation. I can feel it."The book is beautifully illustrated by the author's own artwork, visual testament to the swings in mood, which, at times, complement the words, as in her victory over the disease when she takes back colour through the purchase of a red t-shirt.

A brilliant evocation of humanity

A reviewer, Jude Clarke's book is a wonderous evocation of art in society. Lupus may be foregrounded in the subtitle, but this gal swings: checkin out guys in Vernon, delicious love in Nelson, intricate artwork in Scotland, discovering self and other--really!--in Strasbourg, supermom in Vernon! This book has 'it all'. Thistledown Press should be commended for their Literary Non Fiction Series; if this is an early example, we have much to await, expectantly.