Stefan Merrill Block
When Memory Doesn't Speak
Courtesy of Random House
Stefan Merrill Block (b. 1982).
THE STORY OF FORGETTING
By Stefan Merrill Block
Random House, 313 pages, $25
Stefan Merrill Block’s debut novel, The Story of Forgetting, takes place during the course of one summer in Texas in the late 1990’s, but it also manages to cover decades, looking far back into one family’s history, tracing the Alzheimer’s gene that passed from parent to offspring in a pattern nearly as regular as houndstooth check. It deals with scientific inquiry, putting one humble family under the microscope, but The Story of Forgetting manages to feel big and small in perfect proportion, at once intimate and universal. Mr. Block has made something very beautiful out of something very ugly: a disease that steals people’s lives from them. read more »
