It's Jake's birthday. He is sitting in a small plane, being flown over the landscape that has been the backdrop to his life - his childhood, his marriage, his work, his passions. Now he is in his early 60s, and he isn't quite the man he used to be. He has lost his wife, his son is in prison, and he is about to lose his past, for Jake has Alzheimer's.
As the disease takes hold of him, Jake struggles to hold on to his personal story, to his memories and identity, but they are becoming increasingly elusive and unreliable. What happened to his daughter? Is she alive, or long dead? And why exactly is his son in prison? What went so wrong in his life? There was a cherry tree once, and a yellow dress, but what exactly do they mean?
As Jake, assisted by 'poor Eleanor', a childhood friend with whom for some unfathomable reason he seems to be sleeping, fights the inevitable dying of the light, the key events of his life keep changing as he tries to grasp them, and what until recently seemed solid fact is melting into surreal dreams or nightmarish imaginings.
Is there anything he'll be able to salvage from the wreckage? Beauty, perhaps? The memory of love? Or nothing at all? From the first sentence to the last, The Wilderness holds us in its grip. This is writing of extraordinary power and beauty.
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"Jacob, a widowed architect, is slowly losing his memory due to Alzheimer's, and this story manages to portray his struggle to keep hold of his life while also showing pictures of that life. The unreliability of the narrator is, in many ways, the point of the story: not only is he forgetting, but what he remembers is always, of course, subjective, so the whole question of "what really happened" is rendered moot by the realization that whatever actually happened is only in his head anyway--memory is all we have--and that someone else's version of "what really happened" may be quite different. While there are some truly painful passages, as Jake's frustration with his condition is shown in detail, overall the story is hard to put down. A lovely meditation on life, memory, family, and love."
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Eliza (4 out of 5 stars)