Scar Tissue [Hardcover]

Michael Ignatieff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1994

The author of Blood and Belonging chronicles one woman's descent into Alzheimer's and her sons' painful witness to the tragedy, which is enhanced by their careers in philosophy and neurology and by strengthened family bonds.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This searching, poignant account of a woman's descent into Alzheimer's disease and her son's debilitating existential fear and guilt is a cri de coeur that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. While the subject has been treated before, Ignatieff ( Aysa ) brings to it highly honed powers of observation and a philosophic turn of mind. The title refers to "the dark starbursts of scar tissue" that indicate a brain being destroyed. Haunted by the genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's in his mother's family, the narrator describes each harrowing stage of her illness, meanwhile speculating about the loss of selfhood when language and memory are obliterated. There is irony in his insight that "we have just enough knowledge to know our fate but not enough to do anything to avert it." The ramifications of the mother's decline destroy the family: the narrator ascribes his father's fatal heart attack, the demise of his own marriage, a break with his brother and his months of crippling depression as inescapable consequences. At times, one becomes impatient with the narrator's self-destructive behavior, his utter despair and his emotional estrangement from his wife and children. Though the prose is carefully restrained, as the book reaches its climax there is a tinge of melodrama and excess that does, however, accurately convey the narrator's conviction that he cannot escape his mother's fate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this fictionalized account of a mother's death from Alzheimer's disease told from the perspective of a son, Ignatieff (Asya, LJ 9/15/91) examines the relationships between life, consciousness, disease, and death. Father was a Russian emigre and soil chemist, Mother was a painter with a family history of the disease, and their two sons have grown up to become a neurological researcher and a philosophy professor. It is the philosopher who tells the story, dipping into childhood memories as he recounts embarrassing and excrutiating details of his mother's decline and death. The philosopher probes unceasingly to comprehend his mother's degree of understanding as her memory and sense of self shrink, admiring the abstract beauty of the brain scan that the neurologist dispassionately interprets. And it is the philosopher who finds the seeds of the same disease inside himself. This novel is both beautiful in its quiet celebration of each moment of life and almost unbearable in its exploration of questions most often unasked. This awesome piece of work should be in most collections.
--Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 199 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T) (October 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374254281
• ISBN-13: 978-0374254285
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,158,134 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The heartbreaking loss of an aging parent, November 15, 1998

By 

Rick Hunter (Malone, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scar Tissue (Hardcover)

Michael Ignatieff's 1994 novel Scar Tissue is the story of two brothers, one a neurologist and the other a philosophy professor, coming to grips with their aged mother's descent into a wasting neurological disorder (Alzheimers?). Neither philosophy or science are able to make sense of the illness, and the question ultimately becomes how the narrator and his brother are to carry on in the face of the inexplicable. This is a sensitive story, finely told.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Way of All Minds, January 31, 2005

By 

Stan Persky (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scar Tissue (Paperback)

Although Michael Ignatieff is primarily known as a writer of intelligent books of accessible political theory, his short novel, "Scar Tissue," published more than a decade ago, is a beautifully observed, emotionally precise account of the fraying of minds, flesh, and relationships. It's one the earliest of several good books about the loss of a parent through Alzheimer's disease -- Ignatieff's novel is comparable to John Bayley's memoir of his wife, Iris Murdoch -- but it's more than that. Ignatieff's fiction-maybe-memoir (it has an intensely autobiographical feel) also presents an unsentimental, even merciless, portrait of the book's narrator and his relations with parents, spouse, and others. Again and again, I was struck, and moved by, the psychological accuracy of the book, and the writer's courage in facing up to not only a lot of the "big questions," but to the cost of one's own self-deceptions.

Scar Tissue got a modicum of attention when it first appeared, but I've long had the sense that it deserves many more readers. In addition to all else, I'd put it on any list of "Best Canadian Novels" of the last 15 years.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The novel as memoir: a clearly and intelligently written family breakdown story, August 21, 2006

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Scar Tissue (Paperback)

This is from page one, a clearly and beautifully written work. It is a novel, and for all I know there is much 'fictional' in it, but I read it as a memoir. It is ostensibly the story of the narrator's mother's mental breakdown, her deterioration in a form of Alzheimer. i.e. the work ostensibly centers on the 'mother' her life, her story, what happens to her mind. But it is much more than that . It is a family, or two family stories, and both of breakdown.
The principal story is of family the narrator grew up in. The secondary story is of his own family, his wife and children. The connection is not made so directly, but clearly the breakdown of one family, the illness of the mother and the son narrator's intense devotion to her, lead to the breakdown of the second family, his leaving his wife and two children.
The book also tells the story of two other major characters, the narrator's father and brother. The father a Russian immigrant to America , and the lesser loved parent dies in the course of the mother's illness. The presentation of the lives of the parents, and the relations between them is done in a strong and convincing way. Here again the writer blends present experience and memory in a most effective way.
Also the story of the two brothers is important in relating to a fundamental philosophical theme of the work ie the true meaning of self and identity. The physician brother provides hard scientific insight which of course does not solve the mystery of the mother's mental deterioration, but provides nonetheless a path for understanding it.
The book again is written clearly and is a fluent and gripping read.
My reservations are a bit on the ethical side. The son's seeming lack of attention to his own children in his obsessive care for his mother is to my mind a major fault. Despite the authenticity of the relationships depicted I found myself a bit reserved in feeling , perhaps at my own failure to deeply like , or sympathize with the suffering parents, main characters.
Yet I think my reservations are unimportant here. This book is especially strong in depicting the complexity of family relations, the painful difficulties of real familial relationships.
It too, when it comes down to it, seems to me to succeed as a kind of 'love story' as one in which the narrator- son does display a tremendous devotion and love to his mother.
A humane and again beautifully written book. Very highly recommended.