Turn of Mind is the story of a sixty-four year old female hand surgeon accused of a crime she can't remember committing.
This
is because she has Alzheimer's, and day by day her insight into her
predicament and her life becomes more and more fragile. On good days,
she recognizes her children and has memories of her past. But on many
days, they are no more familiar to her than her caretaker or a stranger
walking down the street.
Dr. Jennifer White is an enigma to the
reader too. She seems to have been a rather remote mother, wife and
friend. Or is this the disease? Has it taken away the qualities that
would make us like her more.
The writing in this novel is highly
original as LaPlante captures the elusive quality of Dr. White's life
through her cryptic writing. The pages turn quickly and yet, at the end,
I felt a bit disappointed. Perhaps it began too late in her disease to
have a real feel for who she was.
Likewise the supporting
characters seem remote and mysterious. But this is what Alzheimers does
to its victims, so how can I fault it? It was certainly a very fine
book, but perhaps not as good as I expected. And the mystery of the
crime is solved in a rather desultory way.
4 comments:
My mother had Alzheimer's and the decline in her memory and personality reduced her day after day. My mother had beautiful penmanship for most of her Life, but towards the end her writing was a barely legible scrawl. Instead of TURN OF THE MIND, I would go with REDUCTION OF THE MIND. At the end, my mother was a shell of the wonderful person she was.
This is one of those kind of books that hits far too close to home for me to read. I read to escape and, clearly, for me, this one would not work at all.
Yes, we have a family member with Alz right now. So difficult.
I read this before it seemed so close to home, Kevin. Not sure I would now.
Focus elsewhere, on the author's part...and perhaps a little too wrapped up in the cleverness of the conceit to make it real?
Indeed, with my mother dying mostly from Alzheimer's half a decade back and my father from Lewy body dementia (augmented by vascular dementia) several years later, there was no joy there...we all knew that these were suffered by her sisters and his mother; it's been my greatest fear, and my lifelong difficulty with retaining anyone's name getting a bit worse as I get up in years doesn't cheer me any (as a teen, I needed to read someone's name to remember it). Reduction of the mind, but also the occasional flashes of the old personalities and some degree of the old intellection trying to reassert themselves, and that perhaps as heartbreaking as anything.
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