by Howard Engel
He also started to bring in other senses to complement the visual. Thus he often moves his tongue, almost unconsciously, as he reads, tracing the shapes of letters on the roof of his mouth. This enables him to read a good deal faster. He is about a third of the way through Great Expectations now, he tells me (though it now takes him a month or more to read a book he might previously have read in an evening). The neurologist Kurt Goldstein, many years ago, described something analogous to this in a patient with alexia who showed a marked improvement in the ability to read as he used his eyes to “palpate” the shapes of letters: in effect, a visual Braille.
Engel used other, more conventional help as well. His editor read the entire book to him once he had made his corrections to the first draft, and this was crucial in helping him to fix the overall structure of the book in his memory, so that he could reorganize it, work on it, thereafter, in a radical way. He also tried an electronic reading program, but found this, for various reasons, unsatisfactory.
Some years ago I saw an eminent publisher, a very literate man, who had also, like Engel, developed visual alexia. (Unlike Engel, he had developed it slowly, in consequence of a deteriorating brain disease, a gradual atrophy of the posterior visual parts of the brain—such a slow degeneration, a so-called focal atrophy, was also present in the alexic pianist whom I later saw.) This publisher found his whole orientation changing with this. He found himself becoming an auditory rather than a visual reader and writer; he devoured books on tape, and wrote by dictation—not only letters and memoranda, but essays, and an entire memoir. Engel, by contrast, has remained much more visual, and seems to prefer the tussle of trying to read books and write them visually, despite his difficulties with this.
Engel sometimes wonders about other writers who have struggled with alexia. He tells me that H.L. Mencken lost the ability to read after he suffered a stroke, but I can ascertain no details of this—Mencken may have suffered a pure alexia, but it seems likely that he had a much more debilitating aphasic stroke, for he did not write in the ten years following his stroke. By chance, today, looking at the August 12, 2004, issue of the New York Review of Books which just arrived, I see a review of a book by the German novelist Gert Hofman. This and two other novels, I read, “were written after Gert Hofman suffered a stroke, which left him unable to read. He dictated them to his wife, and she read the drafts back to him ‘to correct and embellish aloud.’”
The alexic pianist whom I wrote about (“The Case of Anna H.”), after she became unable to read music, developed an extraordinary ability to listen to orchestral and choral works and arrange them for piano entirely in her mind, where before she would have needed manuscript paper and pencil to do this. The alexic publisher also told me that his power to “hear” what he had read or written, and to organize it in his mind, had steadily increased after his alexia. Similar compensatory heightenings are almost universal in the blind—not only the congenitally blind, but those who have lost their sight later in life—and it seems likely that it also occurs in the alexic.
Whatever the strategies employed—whether it is visually learning the shapes of letters anew, or copying and then “reading” them by means of tongue or finger movements, or developing heightened powers of auditory and conceptual memory, there seem to be many ways by which a person with alexia—especially a resourceful, verbal, highly motivated person like a writer—can get around the deficit, find new ways of doing things now that the old ways are unavailable. No doubt, too, there are changes in the brain underlying these adaptations, though these might be beyond the power of present brain imaging to show.
This is not to minimize the continuing impact of a condition like alexia in a world full of newspapers and books, maps and street signs, printed labels and directions on everything one uses—and above all, its impact on a writer like Howard Engel, and the continuing, daily struggle to transcend it, one way or another. It is a struggle that calls for heroic determination and courage, as well as great resourcefulness, patience, and, not least, humour—simply to survive, let alone to produce, as Howard Engel has done, a book (and he tells me that he has just completed another Benny Cooperman novel, to be published after Memory Book).
Given this struggle, this of-necessity unorthodox way of writing, does Engel succeed as a writer? Is the present volume up to the standard of the previous Benny Cooperman novels? My answer, as a reader of detective stories, is “Yes, absolutely.” Indeed, I think this may be the most remarkable of them all, because of its special personal dimension. There have been a number of recent books that have incorporated medical or neurological themes (detectives with Tourette’s syndrome, detectives with autism, etc.)—and indeed this goes back, in suspense novels, to the fiction of Wilkie Collins in the nineteenth century. But Memory Book has a unique depth and authenticity, because Howard Engel has known and traversed all that he writes about. He has, as Bertrand Russell would say, “knowledge by experience,” and no knowledge by description can ever match this.
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DEAD AND BURIED
Howard Engel
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
When Jack Dowden’s widow appeals to Benny to investigate the death of her truck-driving husband, Canada’s favourite gumshoe finds himself up to his egg-saladstained lapels in the deadly filth of Kinross Disposals. As he unearths clues—and PCBs—the body count begins to rise, and Benny does his best not to end up … dead and buried.
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THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN
Howard Engel
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
It all starts with a noisy toilet. Benny Cooperman, the working-stiff private eye, is back, this time trying to sort out the trivial from the deadly in a case that involves faulty plumbing, a dead old woman, and a crooked politician.
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GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
Howard Engel
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
Benny is, as always, desperate for paying work, but he flatly refuses an invitation to work for Grantham’s most notorious crime boss. But Benny doesn’t have much of a choice when Abram Wise has him kidnapped in the middle of the night and gives him an ultimatum: either Benny takes the case, or his parents and girlfriend may run into some very bad luck.
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THE COOPERMAN VARIATIONS
Howard Engel
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
Vanessa Moss, an executive with the National Television Corporation, thinks somebody’s trying to kill her. To protect herself, she engages the services of former classmate and gumshoe Benny Cooperman to go undercover as her personal assistant. Benny discovers a warren of competing executives, backbiting lawyers, arrogant producers, and sycophantic flunkies.
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MEMORY BOOK
Howard Engel
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
Benny is recovering in a Toronto hospital from a serious blow to the head. He was found unconscious beside a dead woman in a dumpster, so he figures he must have been close to solving a case, though he has no memory of the events. With his girlfriend, Anna, working as field agent, he tries to piece together the events that led to a murder―and his own injuries.
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EAST OF SUEZ
Howard Engel
A BENNY COOPERMAN MYSTERY
Left with short-term memory loss and unable to read, Ben
ny Cooperman is ready to pack in his career as a private investigator. But an old schoolmate convinces him to locate her missing husband—or at least the family savings. Benny’s quest takes him to the seductive environs of Murinam, a former French possession in Indonesia, where nothing is as it appears to be. The heat is on as mayhem and murder ensue among the colourful denizens of the tropics, but Benny keeps a cool head.
Find out more about Howard Engel mysteries at
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