Volume 41, Number 17 · October 20, 1994
Death of a Soul
By Helen Vendler
Scar Tissue
by Michael Ignatieff
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 199 pp., $20.00
Several unequivocal announcements about its status preface Scar Tissue: the cover says A NOVEL in small caps, the ISBN listing says 'Fiction,' and the copyright page bears the statement, 'This is a work of fiction. No resemblance to persons alive or dead is either stated or implied.' Yet this book, concerning a mother's descent into Alzheimer's, reads like a memoir, not only in its autobiographical opening ('I do not want to remember her last hour') and its autobiographical end ('My fate has come to meet me. My voyage has begun'), but also, and chiefly, in its restriction to a single life.
Review, 5040 words
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