ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Sunday, April 14, 1996                 TAG: 9604120095
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: 4    EDITION: METRO 
                                             TYPE: BOOK REVIEW

BOOKS IN BRIEF

BRAIN FEVER.

By Valerie Sayers. Doubleday. $23.95.

Middle-aged, pot-bellied, part-time philosophy teacher Tim Rooney leaves his fiancee, her son, and Sayers' well-known setting of Due East, South Carolina, when he feels the familiar stirrings of "brain fever," his grandmother's euphemism for her own mental breakdowns. With $15,000 stuffed inside his socks, Rooney heads for New York to find his wife from a six-day marriage 20 years ago. "I wasn't having a breakdown," he asserts, "I was having a new life."

Though Sayers renders the manic-depressive, schizophrenic disorder masterfully, I didn't find Rooney engaging enough to enjoy accompanying him on his dizzying downward spiral.

- TONI WILLIAMS

ON GRIEF AND REASON: Essays.

By Joseph Brodsky. Farrar Straus Giroux. $24.

Joseph Brodsky came to the United States in 1972 as an involuntary exile from the Soviet Union where he had been accused of "parasitism" because of the underground distribution of his works. In 1987 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1991 he was named poet laureate of his adopted country. Brodsky died of a heart attack at the age of 55 in February of this year.

"On Grief and Reason" is the second volume of Brodsky's essays. It is a rich and varied collection of recollections and observations on topics ranging from his experiences as a child collecting artifacts in war-torn Russia to his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. There are 21 essays, each only a few pages in length.

Brodsky writes with wry, sometimes bitter, humor and with graceful humility. But then, he says, "If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches humility." He has been called the greatest Russian poet of his era, and his disciplined poetic genius is at the root of his elegant prose.

This is a reader's book. You will not be able to put it down.

- MARIE BEAN

Toni Williams writes from her home near Natural Bridge.

Marie Bean is a retired college chaplain.

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