Assault on a Bibliophile’s Brain

The plot in novelist Howard Engel’s new memoir involves the treatment of a rare neurological condition called alexia sine agraphia, which has whacked his ability to read but not his capacity to write. How on earth will he continue to write his detective fiction—leaving aside other stroke-induced problems such as remembering characters and subplots—when he can’t re-read the work in order to do basic editing? This mystery is resolved, as it were, with an account of the successful publication of his novel Memory Book in 2005, the completion of which the memoirist is justifiably proud. The novel renders with fictitious licence (via Engel’s alter ego Benny Cooperman) the same traumatic damage suffered by the author in 2001, and a similarly anxious recovery at Toronto’s Rehab Hospital.

The subplot of The Man Who Forgot How to Read invokes Oliver Sacks. Just as Engel adopts some Dickensian methodology in telling his story (while claiming not to), so he...