Man – Page 4 – Dementia Fiction

Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

Meet Désiré Cordier, a very unusual kind of hero. Fed up with the drudgery of retired life, hen-pecked by a bossy wife and irritated by his extended family, retired librarian Désiré hatches a cunning plan. He will gradually feign the symptoms of Dementia until he lands himself a place in a retirement home and a much-needed dose of peace and quiet. All goes according to plan. Désiré is able to fake his way through the memory test his doctor sets him and soon finds himself a resident in Winterlight Home for the Elderly.

“On paper it seemed easy enough: I would more or less crumble away like one of those lonely bluffs you see in Westerns. Slowly, but inexorably, with something resembling grandeur, I would blur and gradually disappear in the mist I myself was discharging.”

However, his plan doesn’t live up to expectations. Constantly feigning Dementia isn’t an enjoyable way of living. He’s beset by daily indignities and frustrated at his own limitations. He’s also shocked to discover he’s not the first resident to have come up with a similar exit plan. Plus, the retirement home isn’t as safe as he’d hoped -he’s sharing his living quarters with a war criminal- and Rosa Rozendaal, his childhood crush is too advanced in her own Dementia to return his amorous advances. It isn’t long before Désiré begins to question the wisdom of what he’s done.

Ably translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, Verhulst’s short novel is a darkly comic exploration of life within a retirement home. It’s funny, honest, sometimes brutally so, and full of well-placed observations about the staff, the residents and the visitors. By crafting a protagonist who’s feigning Dementia Verhulst offers the readers a unique insight into how a person with Dementia is treated and perceived by the people around him. In the following section he describes his daughter’s final visit to Winterlight.

“She could no longer bear to visit someone who didn’t recognise her. The only man she was willing to recognise as her father had dissolved in the mists of his own memory. This was going to be her last trip to this den of misery, her final symbolic visit, to round it all off.”

In normal circumstances a person living with advanced Dementia might be incapable of articulating the experience with the insight and eloquence we get from Désiré. The first person narrative is incredibly affecting. By the time we get to the end of the novel and, like Désiré, realise his family and the people who care for him can no longer see him for the person he is, we understand his frustration and empathise with his lack of autonomy. The Latecomer is a clever novel which uses a bold plot device to place the reader firmly in the shoes of a person living with Dementia. As such, I think it’s a really useful read.

The Latecomer was published by Portobello Books in 2015

“An Absent Mind” by Eric Rill

An Absent Mind is a slim novel set in contemporary Canada. It explores the impact of a Dementia diagnosis on a close family unit. The novel opens with the patriarch, Saul beginning to acknowledge his own mental confusion. It moves through his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the advent of the illness and subsequent decline, his move to a care facility and eventually, both his own death and that of his wife, Monique whom he actually outlives. The story is told from the perspective of five different characters, all of whom speak directly to the reader in first person monologues. We meet Saul himself, a proud and occasionally difficult Jewish man, used to getting his own way, and his longsuffering wife Monique who isn’t even certain she’s made the right decision in staying married for so long to such an overbearing man.

“Given everything, would I do it all over again? Maybe. Maybe not. But I made my choice years ago, and I am almost sixty-six and a grandmother.”

The other monologues are delivered by Saul’s son Joey, with whom he has a troubled relationship, his devoted daughter Florence and the Alzheimer’s specialist who oversees Saul’s treatment and care. The first person sections narrated by Saul himself give an excellent insight into the progress of his illness and how frustrated he is with his situation. It’s not easy for a man as powerful and proud as Saul to watch his autonomy gradually disappear. His accounts of events, lucid at first, become increasingly rambling and confusing as the novel proceeds. Saul’s chapters become shorter as his grasp on language erodes, until the final few chapters consist of nothing but strange composite words, (“Just…hEr as Pretti…Choo fLeur,”) which can be interpreted as meaningful within the context of his story, but are nonsensical to the uninformed. However, what makes An Absent Mind a truly unique reading experience in regards to Dementia, is the way it depicts the collateral damage inflicted upon those close to Saul.

Monique struggles to serve a now vulnerable man who has often made himself deliberately hard to like. Saul isn’t particularly affectionate or grateful. He has always been a demanding man. Now, faced with becoming her husband’s carer, Monique wears herself down physically and mentally trying to look after someone who never went out of his way to look after her. It’s a familiar and very believable snapshot of what many families and partners face when a difficult person develops Dementia. Rill is brave and honest to state so bluntly that an obnoxious person who is living with Dementia will most likely be as unlikable as they were before developing the illness. Joey also struggles with this. His father never tells him he loves him and is constantly putting his son down. Joey finds it hard to love and feel loved by his father. It’s only after Saul loses his ability to communicate that Joey finds a note scribbled in his father’s handwriting,

“Dear Joey, I never told you while I was alive how much I loved you and how proud I am…”

Rather than bringing some sense of closure, this admission leads Joey to wonder why his father never once, in forty years, uttered these words himself. An Absent Mind is a novel about families and the complex and subtle ways in which people can both love and utterly devastate each other. It’s a novel about missed opportunities and important truths which have gone unsaid, dependency, disappointment and failed expectations. All these issues are present in most families. However, Rill in his novel, exemplifies the way Dementia will exasperate existing problems and expose a family’s fault lines. He paints a bleak but unflinchingly honest portrait of a real family trying to muddle through.

An Absent Mind was published by Lake Union in 2015