As part of my reading habits I have been working through the Booker/Man Booker shortlists since the beginning of their time. I always have several novels waiting in the wings and my reading of these is interspersed with more current titles, and novels which are less demanding and of the more popular thriller variety As it happens this novel was the first I spotted in my basket of 'wallflowers'.
At the heart of Michael Ignatieff's riveting novel about a woman's descent into Alzheimer's are the tangled threads of a Midwestern family, frayed by time and tragedy yet still connected - as much by pride, embarrassed love, and sibling rivalry as by the painful ties of family loyalty. More than a tale of isolated tragedy, Scar Tissue explores the bonds of memory, their configuartion in self-identity, and their relationship to love, loyalty, and death.
It is a son's account of his mother's voyage into a world of neurological disease and anyone, and there are so many of us, who has lived their parent through that journey will find much that resonates in this memoir. I find it a particular point of interest that none of the main characters is given a name... Wikipedia gives a plot summary as follows:
The book details one woman’s struggle with Alzheimer's (or dementia, it’s not clear) and how her family respond to it. In particular, it is one of her son’s voice the reader hears since he is narrating it. Another son isn’t involved so much as he is living in Boston practicing as a neuroscientist. So it is the narrator who bears most of the burden. And all the while, he is trying to work on his marriage and his career as a philosophy professor. His own family life is hardly acknowledged and tears in his marriage begin to show, towards his wife; there for moral support but can't come to terms with him not being a consistent, central figure at the moment.
While her illness begins with her repeating stories ad nauseam, things get much worse as she starts to be incapable of recognizing her own family. Thus the prime caretaker – the son – ends up separating from his wife and living in derelict conditions. Nonetheless, he remains positive about the nature of life and death, even once he has lost both his parents, concluding that he “know[s] that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment…I will be face to face at last with a pure and heartless reality beyond anything a living soul can possibly imagine
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