Review: Oliver's twists

30 June 2015 - 02:00 By Jane Shilling, ©The Telegraph

On the cover of Oliver Sacks's autobiography is a photograph of a leather-jacketed hunk astride a motorbike. It bears a perplexing resemblance to a still of Marlon Brando from The Wild One. But summon the mind's barber and - blimey, could it be? Yes, it is! Back in 1961, Dr Oliver Sacks, neurologist, physician, feted author, beloved chronicler of the strange narratives of neurological disorder, was a leather-clad hunk on a BMW R60 bike.Readers of Sacks's books have gleaned a good deal of knowledge about his life. In accounts drawn from his clinical observation of patients (Migraine, Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), Sacks stands at an angle to the narrative, as a chronicler of the extraordinary personal dramas enacted by his patients. But in interviews he has acknowledged that even his more formal essays in autobiography (A Leg to Stand On, Uncle Tungsten) contain "hesitancies" about aspects of his life.This is as close as we are likely to come to a classical autobiography, arranged in roughly chronological order and exhilaratingly punctuated with meditations on the life scientific, artistic, mechanical, pharmaceutical and erotic.Oliver Wolf Sacks was born on July 9, 1933, the youngest of four sons of two physicians in England. Oliver was his mother's darling and her horror when, aged 18, he admitted that he was homosexual was vehement. "You are an abomination," she said. "I wish you had never been born."He is both forthcoming and not about his family. There are extended, affectionate passages about his father. In middle age, he made the "joyous discovery" of his brother Marcus, 10 years his senior, who had gone to Australia in 1950. With this "quiet, scholarly, thoughtful and warm" elder sibling, Oliver formed a relationship that had proved impossible with his other brothers, David, "so unlike me - dapper, charming, social", and Michael, "lost in the depths of schizophrenia".The essence of this book is the journey, not the glittering progression of achievements. What a long, strange trip it's been: from the epic weightlifting exploits and wild ingestion of drugs in his youth to the painstaking observation and imaginative scope that has characterised his intellectual life as a scientist and writer - and the unexpected accident of finding love with a fellow writer in his 70s, after 35 years of celibacy.In February, Sacks announced that his cancer had metastasised and he had only a short time to live. "This does not mean I am finished with life," he wrote. "On the contrary. I feel intensely alive." On the Move by Oliver Sacks, published by Picador, R285..

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