Michael Ignatieff’s Nouveau Modesty

In his lacerating novel Scar Tissue (1993), which was shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread awards, Michael Ignatieff offers an intimate portrayal of losing his mother to Alzheimer’s disease. The novel’s characters are fictionalized, but the thoughts, reflections, and locutions are unmistakably Ignatieff’s. He represents Alzheimer’s as a form of death in life, a curse that is genetic in origin but metaphysical in meaning. Ignatieff imagines the accumulation of amyloid plaques, the “dark starbursts of scar tissue” in the brain, as a familial bequest: “I have seen the inheritance,” he writes, “the family silver.” And he imagines how the disease will eventually come for him, too:

I know that at the very last moment, when everything I ever knew has been effaced from my mind, when pure vacancy has taken possession of me, then light of the purest whiteness will stream in through my eyes into the radiant and empty plain of my...