(no subject)
Dec. 15th, 2007 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelseagirlA book review I wrote for LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, for The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block. FWIW, the book won't be released 'til next April, but I recommend it highly.
The Story of Forgetting is an impressive debut novel by Stefan Merrill Block. Set in rural and suburban Texas, the narrative intercuts between the memories of Abel Haggard, an aging hermit living alone in his family’s decaying farmhouse, the narrative of awkward and scientifically-inclined teenager Seth Waller, struggling to understand his mother’s descent into early-onset Alzheimer’s, and tales of Isidora, a mythical land of forgetting and happiness. The outsider-narrators, neither of them prepossessing in the slightest, are yet deeply sympathetic characters, whose fate the reader comes to care about deeply. While the Isidora tales are, perhaps, overly obvious in their connection with the disease, they are nonetheless lovely, and the passages where Seth shares his scientific researches and discoveries, which could easily have become skippable, are in fact engaging and useful in understanding the progress of his mother’s disease. Block’s prose is engaging and compelling, and his depiction of Seth’s mother’s gradual decay is heart-rending. A few isolated moments took me outside the text: referring to a fictional English aristocrat (the Patient Zero of a particular genetic mutation) as Duke [his last name] is inaccurate. But any quibbles are minor -- this is a book I will recommend warmly.
The Story of Forgetting is an impressive debut novel by Stefan Merrill Block. Set in rural and suburban Texas, the narrative intercuts between the memories of Abel Haggard, an aging hermit living alone in his family’s decaying farmhouse, the narrative of awkward and scientifically-inclined teenager Seth Waller, struggling to understand his mother’s descent into early-onset Alzheimer’s, and tales of Isidora, a mythical land of forgetting and happiness. The outsider-narrators, neither of them prepossessing in the slightest, are yet deeply sympathetic characters, whose fate the reader comes to care about deeply. While the Isidora tales are, perhaps, overly obvious in their connection with the disease, they are nonetheless lovely, and the passages where Seth shares his scientific researches and discoveries, which could easily have become skippable, are in fact engaging and useful in understanding the progress of his mother’s disease. Block’s prose is engaging and compelling, and his depiction of Seth’s mother’s gradual decay is heart-rending. A few isolated moments took me outside the text: referring to a fictional English aristocrat (the Patient Zero of a particular genetic mutation) as Duke [his last name] is inaccurate. But any quibbles are minor -- this is a book I will recommend warmly.
