For more than five years I've had "The Story of Forgetting" on my shelves. For personal reasons it has taken me a while to gather enough courage to tackle it. My maternal grandmother was ravaged and died quickly and devastatingly from a particularly destructive strain of Alzheimer's disease. For some reason now seemed the right time, so I dug in and read it with some trepidation. The books has four separate sections that slowly converge throughout the book.
Seth, a teenager with no siblings, struggles with an overactive mind, what unmistakably sounds like general anxiety disorder, and being the acne-covered outcast at school. On top of that his mother starts loosing her memory and is deteriorating quickly. Seth's father, unable to cope, drowns his sorrow in gin cocktails and History Channel documentaries on WWII.
Then there's Abel, the sole survivor of a small family. A hunchbacked cripple living on a large piece of farmland which he has increasing difficulties managing. He lives primarily in the past, where he shared a home with his twin brother Paul and Paul's wife Mae. There are several tragedies haunting his past and he tries to make sense of them all.
There's a section describing a mythical land called Isidora. Physically it resembles El Dorado, a city where everything is made out of gold. More importantly the inhabitants of Isidora have no memory at all. Therefore there are no conflicts, no sorrow, no war and people fall in love several hundred times during their lifetime. There's no spoken language, words are unnecessary, only a few gestures exist that everyone understands. Both Seth and Abel have been told the stories of Isidora from their mothers.
The final section is Seth's attempt to understand and track the particular strain of Alzheimer's that has afflicted his mother. Not only is it early on-set, but also highly hereditary, leaving Seth with a 50% chance of developing the horrific disease himself. This section is somewhat technical, laden with descriptions of the biological aspects of the disease, how it works, and what gene mutation it entails. Herein also lies the origin tale of the disease and a great, albeit theoretical and fictional, description of how a hereditary disease like this gets spread all over the world.
The four sections are interwoven throughout the book and are on a collision course from the beginning. To expect that the book's puzzle is a great mystery to be solved, is in my opinion to miss the point entirely. The author Stefan Merrill Block does not try to hide what is the inevitable conclusion, so this is not the point of the book. Instead the focus lies on how people try to cope with this disease in different ways, and also how destructive a force silence can be. Silence between loved ones, even though held in an attempt to spare each other, might have disastrous consequences.
Block was a young man when he wrote the book and I think he succeeds for the most part in telling a story of a much greater maturity than his age would have me believe. A few times he fumbles the ball, and he tends to get carried away by all the research he's done to make the book as accurate as possible. As a reader of a fictional work I don't need all the research on the page, it is of much greater importance that I believe the story and its progression.
For a debut novel this is a great work, and I will surely seek out his second novel. He writes with great humanity and there are moments of profound beauty and heartbreak. I recommend the book even though it has several small mistakes and somewhat sloppy editing at places. But do bear in mind that if anyone close to you has suffered from Alzheimer's or other types of dementia, the book will tear open old wounds. That is not an entirely bad thing. Beauty and acceptance can come from this. I believe that would be Block's biggest accomplishment with this work.
