Memories of Amnesia

About ten years ago, when I was in the Army, I found this book (in the Stars and Stripes bookstore of all places) and promptly fell in love with it. To be brief, it is the fictional account of a brain surgeon who falls victim to brain damage (in the form of a tumor). The book narrates (from the perspective of apparent sanity--one is led to suppose that the narrator overcame his ailment) the gradual mental collapse of a highly intelligent physician who is quite aware what is happening to him but is only intermittently able to do anything about it. To make matters worse, his insanity takes the form of a kind of sporadic allegiance to his own disease, a revolutionary fervor that leads him to reject the "tyranny" of his brain in favor of the cancerous cells rebelling against it. The result is a kind of Moebius strip, a story with no stable foundation, a narrative that proceeds in a series of self-devouring cognitive maneuvers worthy of Samuel Beckett: no evaluative judgement of the apparently insightful narrator can be trusted, since any such judgement is apt to dissolve and reform very convincingly into its antithesis at any moment. Shainberg brilliantly mocks standard assumptions about sanity, health, and "normality," provides many marvelous examples of satire and fine writing along the way (e.g., the devastatingly funny portrait of the phony guru Sensei, who interprets the narrator's disease as enlightenment), and manages to build the tension relentlessly until the novel's grotesque and shocking conclusion. In short, the book is a small masterpiece. Naturally I looked for others by Shainberg, but he seems to have written very little--the only thing I found by him was a book called "Brain Surgeon," which was good but pedestrian compared to his foray into fiction.