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Scar Tissue, by Michael Ignatieff
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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.
- Sales Rank: #1352440 in Books
- Color: White
- Published on: 2000-06-15
- Released on: 2000-06-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .48" w x 5.50" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 212 pages
- ISBN13: 9780374527693
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Publishers Weekly
This searching, poignant account of a woman's descent into Alzheimer's disease and her son's debilitating existential fear and guilt is a cri de coeur that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. While the subject has been treated before, Ignatieff ( Aysa ) brings to it highly honed powers of observation and a philosophic turn of mind. The title refers to "the dark starbursts of scar tissue" that indicate a brain being destroyed. Haunted by the genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's in his mother's family, the narrator describes each harrowing stage of her illness, meanwhile speculating about the loss of selfhood when language and memory are obliterated. There is irony in his insight that "we have just enough knowledge to know our fate but not enough to do anything to avert it." The ramifications of the mother's decline destroy the family: the narrator ascribes his father's fatal heart attack, the demise of his own marriage, a break with his brother and his months of crippling depression as inescapable consequences. At times, one becomes impatient with the narrator's self-destructive behavior, his utter despair and his emotional estrangement from his wife and children. Though the prose is carefully restrained, as the book reaches its climax there is a tinge of melodrama and excess that does, however, accurately convey the narrator's conviction that he cannot escape his mother's fate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this fictionalized account of a mother's death from Alzheimer's disease told from the perspective of a son, Ignatieff (Asya, LJ 9/15/91) examines the relationships between life, consciousness, disease, and death. Father was a Russian emigre and soil chemist, Mother was a painter with a family history of the disease, and their two sons have grown up to become a neurological researcher and a philosophy professor. It is the philosopher who tells the story, dipping into childhood memories as he recounts embarrassing and excrutiating details of his mother's decline and death. The philosopher probes unceasingly to comprehend his mother's degree of understanding as her memory and sense of self shrink, admiring the abstract beauty of the brain scan that the neurologist dispassionately interprets. And it is the philosopher who finds the seeds of the same disease inside himself. This novel is both beautiful in its quiet celebration of each moment of life and almost unbearable in its exploration of questions most often unasked. This awesome piece of work should be in most collections.
--Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Well into his story, Ignatieff asks why he is writing it as a novel. If indeed he is--and most readers will suspect the book is much more personal than fictional--it seems obvious he chose to write a novel because he could not bear writing biography or autobiography. The narrator, a teacher of philosophy, describes what happens to himself, his parents, and his neurologist brother as his mother goes through the long, ugly process of dying from Alzheimer's disease. Guilt-ridden as well as philosophical, the narrator tries to figure out feelings, emotions, and causes during the years of his mother's illness, first at the family home and then in a nursing home. The increasing tensions of his life during this difficult period destroy relations with his wife and children and turn him inward, and the gradually changing relationship between him and his brother enables him to examine both emotional and scientific aspects of life and death. Near the end, he asks, "Does understanding anything make a difference, if there is nothing you can do to stop it happening?" William Beatty
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
The Way of All Minds
By Stan Persky
Although Michael Ignatieff is primarily known as a writer of intelligent books of accessible political theory, his short novel, "Scar Tissue," published more than a decade ago, is a beautifully observed, emotionally precise account of the fraying of minds, flesh, and relationships. It's one the earliest of several good books about the loss of a parent through Alzheimer's disease -- Ignatieff's novel is comparable to John Bayley's memoir of his wife, Iris Murdoch -- but it's more than that. Ignatieff's fiction-maybe-memoir (it has an intensely autobiographical feel) also presents an unsentimental, even merciless, portrait of the book's narrator and his relations with parents, spouse, and others. Again and again, I was struck, and moved by, the psychological accuracy of the book, and the writer's courage in facing up to not only a lot of the "big questions," but to the cost of one's own self-deceptions.
Scar Tissue got a modicum of attention when it first appeared, but I've long had the sense that it deserves many more readers. In addition to all else, I'd put it on any list of "Best Canadian Novels" of the last 15 years.
5 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A complex tale of illness and death
By Philippe Vandenbroeck
"I could call this the history of my family as the history of our characteristic illness. I could also call it the history of an illness as the history of one family", says Michael Ignatieff at the outset of his novel Scar Tissue. Although the author has built himself a reputation as a scholarly historian, biographer and culture chronicler, this book is by no means a vapid academic exercise. To the contrary, in barely 200 pages the author paints a very personal and infernal journey to the extremities of human life.
The book can be read in different ways. First it is a detailed account of the dynamics of a particular pathology. The narrator describes step by step how his mother is overpowered by a mysterious illness and how it gradually dismantles her personality. Here, Ignatieff's prose can be very moving. The description of his youth is suffused with a fragile, arcadian light, contrasting effectively with the searching, melancholy figures of father and mother. The dramatic clair-obscur is tastefully woven into the fabric of the whole novel and lends a poetic tension to the work.
Additionally, the confrontation with a devastating neurological illness forms the basis for a compelling philosophical investigation. In this sense, the book draws the contours of a few classical questions in personality theory. What is a person? When has someone reached the point of psychic regression where the 'I' has been dissolved? Can human identity be reduced to a particular neurochemical balance, or is there more than only organic substance? In Scar Tissue, Michael Ignatieff explicitly confronts two distinct philosophical positions - materialism and idealism - with the mystery of life and death. The narrator, philosopher, and his brother, neurophysiologist, are proxy for these two different types of rationality: "As my father used to say, 'Your brother has a propositional intelligence.' Meaning he had a way of reasoning that viewed ordinary life and its problems from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Whereas, my father said, I had 'an autobiographical intelligence', which was his way of saying I had a scatty female mind, interested in gossip and personal details and stories and character, things he didn't have time for.' So, a Platonic, conceptual and scientific way of thinking and an Aristotelian, pragmatic and context-sensitive rationality are crushing their teeth on the abyssmal problem of fate and death. Maybe, at the end of the story, we are witness to some sort of synthesis: "Human identity is neurochemical. Infinitely small amounts of neurotransmitter fluid, microscopic levels of electrical charge make the difference between selfhood and loss. Sanity is finely poised. Fate is measured in pica-litres. On the other hand, fate is beautiful. Feel the slow beating descent of its black wings.'
The book's finale may seem a little contrived: pushed completely out of his existential balance, the narrator undertakes a radical quest for selflessness, an intentional destruction of his own person, into a state of pure emptiness. However, it seems to me this is another level at which Scar Tissue can be read: ultimately, in its appeal to the symbolism of death and rebirth, the story develops a logic akin to an initiation rite. Ignatieff's state of pure vacancy and selflessness corresponds to the embryonic condition, a prerequisite for each regeneration (Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane is useful background reading here). On the final page, the author prepares for the final part of the journey: "But I know that there is a life beyond this death, a time beyond this time. I know that at the very last moment, when everything I ever knew has been effaced from my mind, when pure vacancy has taken possession of me, then light of the purest whiteness will stream in through my eyes into the radiant and empty plain of my mind." And then back to the magnificent motto from the hand of John Milton:
"So by this infirmity may I be perfected, by this completed. So in this darkness, may I be clothed in light."
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