Tag: memoir

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Book Reviews

“The Old King in His Exile” by Arno Geiger

Translated from the German by Stefan Tobler

I’m beginning to notice something of a trend in my reading. Writers who have a parent living with Dementia will often take the opportunity to write about the experience. Many of these books are much more interesting and, dare I say it, better written than the regular Dementia biographies. In The Old King in His Exile, Austrian novelist, Arno Geiger turns his attention to his father and charts the progress of his illness over several decades. The slow progression of the text was one of the main things I enjoyed about this book. Geiger has made a point of letting the story take its time. 

“With this book, I wanted to take my time. I saved up for six years. At the same time, I wanted to write it before my father died. I didn’t want to tell his story after his death. I wanted to write about a living person. I felt that my father, like everyone else, deserved to have an open-ended destiny.”

The book reads more like a novel than a regular biography. There are small snippets of conversation included, frequent trips back into the past as Geiger presents the reader with his father’s history and small vignettes of everyday life. It is beautifully written and meandering in tone. There’s a gentleness I loved about the way Geiger approaches his father’s illness. He gives the older man room to be what he needs to be. There’s no sense of rushing his story, no sense of trying to impose sense upon the narrative. This is not Dementia utilised as a plot device. This is carefully and respectfully bearing witness to the last few years of a loved one’s life. I particularly loved the image Geiger used to describe his father’s gentle decline.

I half-remembered a phrase about ending something in beauty. If my father carried on like this, then the same would be true for him as I had once read in a Thomas Hardy novel, which talked of an old man who approached death as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line – changing his direction so slowly that, in spite of the nearness, it was unclear that the two would ever meet.”

I know I will return to this text. It has offered me a blueprint for how to write about a person living with Dementia with dignity, respect and above all things, space. It seems almost wrong to have to point this out, but many Dementia memoirs are more focused upon the person recording the life, than the person whose story it actually is. The Old King in his Exile is definitely Geiger’s father’s story, yet in writing it with so much openness and genuine fondness, Geiger constantly reveals more and more about his own character.

The Old King in His Exile was published by And Other Stories in 2017 

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Book Reviews

“I Remain in Darkness” by Annie Ernaux

Translated from the French by Tanya Leslie

This slim volume was my first experience of the French author Annie Ernaux, a writer I’ve been intending to read for quite some time. This particular book has been namechecked in so many essays and articles I’ve read in the last few weeks it felt like the perfect opportunity to begin my reading relationship with Ernaux. I enjoyed I Remain in Darkness so much I have already ordered several more of her books. The writing is razor sharp, analytical and incredibly well-observed. Though it’s often painfully focused on the banal, repetitive and unpleasant aspects of watching a loved one’s journey with Dementia the language is so beautiful and each word so perfectly placed it still reads a little like prose poetry.

“My mother’s colour is fading. To grow old is to fade, to become transparent.”

Chronicling a period of four years, Ernaux sketches small intimate portraits of moments with her mother as an Alzheimer’s diagnosis gradually takes over her life. She’s moved from home into a residential care facility where Ernaux visits her frequently and also give us snapshots into the lives and experiences of the other residents. Much is made of the way Dementia removes privacy and autonomy. This is mostly viewed as a negative consequence of the illness. However, Ernaux also effectively explores the interdependency of the carer/cared for relationship. At times she seems to relish the closeness she’s found in being so intimately involved in her mother’s everyday life. She weaves in allusions to her own childhood, when her mother cared for her, the relationship she has with her two children and the way she is now caring for her mother like a child. There is a sense that this interdependency is both natural and at the same time shameful; that people are designed to care for each other, yet the harsh realities of caring are not something to be openly talked about.

“His mother too is suffering from Alzheimer’s; he talks about in a low voice, he is ashamed. Everyone is ashamed.”

Again and again Ernaux writes of her reluctance to write about her mother’s illness so honestly as if, in doing so, she is violating trust. And yet she cannot stop herself. Her own story is so closely tied to her mother’s story in order to understand herself she must explore her mother’s experience. At one point she goes as far as to say, (of her mother’s body), “the body which I see is also mine.” More than any other first person account I’ve read so far, I Remain in Darkness, seeks to place the carer, (and by default), the reader in a position of intimate empathy with the person who is living with dementia. As such it is a deeply upsetting but essential read.

I Remain in Darkness is a meditation on ageing, family, loss, love and memory which does not shy away from recording the more troubling aspects of Dementia. There is an ongoing focus upon the indignities associated with the illness as Ernaux observes her mother losing both her mental and physical capabilities. There is also humour present here, warmth and an attempt to explore both the present and past self of a person living with Dementia. A lot is left open to interpretation and there’s no attempt made to neatly join up the dots or offer a comforting resolution in the closing pages. As alluded to in the title, Ernaux and her mother remain largely in darkness throughout the book, struggling to find each other in the dark. I felt equally lost at times, yet relished the chance to glimpse what life might be like for a person living with Dementia who is constantly trying to find herself. I would recommend this book as an important read.

I Remain in Darkness was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2020

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Book Reviews

“Stammered Songbook; A Mother’s Book of Hours” by Erwin Mortier

Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent

I first came across Dutch writer, Erwin Mortier’s, Stammered Songbook, a number of years ago and was almost instantly captivated by its use of language, it’s honesty and originality. It has remained one of my favourite pieces of writing about Dementia ever since. Mortier begins documenting his mother’s descent into Dementia as he notices her becoming confused. He continues to write about her and the development of her condition until she is close to death. In beautiful, lyrical language he weaves the story of his mother’s life around her journey with Dementia so time becomes a fleeting, nebulous thing. Past is present and present is past. This confused notion of the temporal allows the reader to explore the confusion which Mortier’s mother is experiencing and how it’s affecting her family. 

The narrative is written in first person throughout. Mortier’s account of his mother’s Dementia is largely told through his relationship with her. We see his mother through his eyes and we also see how he imagines her seeing the world, including himself. 

“Today my mother gave me a thorough dusting, thinking I was a piece of furniture.”

Mortier also records his father’s responses to his mother’s decline. There are dozens of tiny poignant snapshots of what a marriage looks like when placed under the strain of a Dementia diagnosis. His father tries to care for his wife at home and eventually, succumbing to the strain this causes, makes the decision to place her in a care facility. Both father and mother share Mortier’s sympathy and also his frustration. He loves them. He feels sorry for them. But he also subtly acknowledges that the situation they’re facing isn’t easy on either of them, or on him. The reader can sense the honest frustration implied within interactions like the following conversation with his father.

“I say: no one expects you to be strong. No one expects you to be able to handle this.

It’s quite something, he says, leaving someone behind whom you’ve known for fifty years.”

With Mortier’s mother, the relationship is even more complex. He talks of her helplessness and her dependence upon others, including himself, for the most basic kinds of care and provisions. He is very honest about the particularities of physically caring for an elderly person’s bodily needs though most of the narrative focuses in on his mother’s mental decline. He makes a point early on of acknowledging a gradual erosion of his mother’s self.

“Her “I” is becoming lost. That “something” that makes people so recognizably themselves.”

Looking after his mother not only involves practical care, but also -as the person chronicling the end of her life- a kind of representation. Mortier is speaking on behalf of his mother, voicing the experiences she can no longer explain and filling in gaps in the narrative where her memory has eroded. There is a responsibility inherent within this role to admit the points at which his own ability to accurately convey her experience runs out. At times the structure of Stammered Songbook is most reminiscent of prose poetry: small blocks of text which explore an idea or a theme using lyrical, resonant language.

“Will a day come when no one

remembers the right mistakes, no one still

knows what speech impediment

exactly to feed?

Will anyone bore through your sandcastle

of semantics with

firebreaks and understanding?” 

Mortier leaves so much white space in his writing. He has a poet’s sensibility when it comes to allowing his word’s to resonate and be interpreted by the reader. For me, this makes Stammered Songbook a particularly effective Dementia narrative. Little is fixed or concrete within this text. Everything’s up for interpretation and misrepresentation, as is often the case for those living with Dementia like Mortier’s mother.

Stammered Songbook was published by Pushkin Press in 2015