Stammered Songbook review – unflinching, moving study of a parent with Alzheimer’s

A poet’s eye for detail gives power to this slender volume from the Flemish author Erwin Mortier

This slender book by the great Flemish writer Erwin Mortier packs more punch than many a heftier volume. A cry of anguish at the ingenious forms dying can take, it is also an unflinching study of Alzheimer’s disease, which robbed his mother, at the early age of 65, of speech, memory and self. “Today my mother gave me a thorough dusting, thinking I was a piece of furniture. Perhaps a chest of drawers or an old cooker.”

So these stammered songs begin. They follow the disappearance into oblivion of a once vivacious woman, a mother of five, who was at the centre of a busy household. She first jumbles, then loses language, co-ordination, recognition, sleep and appetite, becoming thinner and frailer. It is only her husband she continues to know, following him about mutely while she can, with restless, tottering steps. He won’t give her up to a care home, but the burden is heavy.

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