Books: Scar Tissue

Abstract

Scar Tissue Michael Ignatieff Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001 PB, 212pp, $18.00, 978-0374527693 Dementia can be a devastating neurological disorder which many of us fear. Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian academic, author and politician, explores the territory of dementia in this thoughtful novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize. This is a son’s story of his mother’s dementia and a moving meditation on the effects of loss and the nature of personhood. The narrator is a philosophy professor whose observation of his mother’s intellectual deterioration and its effects is contrasted with his brother’s …