'An insult to the brain'
nationalpost.com
Anne Marie Owens
National Post
Friday, December 13, 2002
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CREDIT: Kevin Van Paassen, National Post
THE CASE OF THE MYSTERY WRITER WHO COULD NOT READ WHAT HE WROTE: Howard Engel, shown yesterday at his Toronto home, has for a year suffered from alexia, which renders texts inscrutable. Yet he plowed ahead with a new novel, aided by friends and an editor who reads his material back to him -- and says it turned out to be one of his quickest.
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In the latest Benny Cooperman mystery, novelist Howard Engel makes his popular detective struggle with an injury that has taken away his ability to read and renders even the most familiar words into gibberish.
The mild-mannered detective with a penchant for chopped egg sandwiches must follow the clues while handicapped by a disorder that allows him to write easily but makes reading anything, from a menu to a ransom note, an arduous task.
The premise might seem implausible, but it is rooted in the award-winning novelist's reality: Mr. Engel is a writer who is unable to read what he has written.
There is nothing wrong with his vision, but when Mr. Engel looks down at the blocks of copy on the page, even the most familiar words -- and even those which he has only just written -- look as if they are in Russian or some other language equally indecipherable to the author.
He has the ability to sound out words, as a new reader does, but no apparent memory to recall even the simplest words when he next encounters them.
"The most maddening thing is when you read an article and a person's name is mentioned throughout, I will have no recall, so that every time I encounter that name will be as difficult as the first," he said in an interview. "I have to sound everything out, so that even the most familiar words take a very long time to remember."
He describes the effect on his writing: "It is like I am in a dark room and I'm trying to look at a Sistine Chapel with a candle or a very narrow focused flashlight ... When you are trying to get a sense of the manuscript, it's difficult to get a sense of the whole thing."
The strange situation stems from a neurological disorder called alexia, which makes the brain re-order words, letters and sometimes even objects, in ways that make no sense, and which Mr. Engel encountered after having a stroke just over a year ago.
It would be a life-altering handicap for anybody, but how can a writer continue with his work under such unusual conditions?
Mr. Engel, who is 70, is a founder of Crime Writers of Canada, author of more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction, winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for outstanding achievement in crime writing, and a novelist revered by mystery fans the world over for his Benny Cooperman series.
Remarkably, even though he can no longer read what he writes, he continues to be a prolific writer, and has just completed the latest instalment in his detective series, a follow-up to The Cooperman Variations.
This novel was written entirely post-stroke, and despite the obvious constraints imposed by his sudden inability to read, Mr. Engel says it might actually have been one of his quickest to write.
The experts refer to his disorder as "an insult to the brain," a description the writer cannot help but admire. It is known officially as alexia without agraphia (reading disorder without writing disorder), and is a type of aphasia, which usually stems from an injury to the left hemisphere of the brain, which mediates all aspects of language knowledge.
Mr. Engel's case has been written about by Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist whose books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat and whose clinical experiences were the basis for the Robin Williams movie Awakenings.
In a letter that Mr. Engel wrote to Dr. Sacks while recovering from the stroke in a Toronto hospital, he described what occurs when he looks at a piece of text, either typeface or handwritten: "Whatever I'm looking at turns into unfamiliar blocks of type that could at first glance be taken for Serbo-Croatian. Familiar words, including my own name, are unfamiliar blocks of type and have to be sounded out slowly. Each time a name recurs in an article or review, it hits me as unfamiliar on its last appearance as it does on the first."
Dr. Sacks refers to Mr. Engel in a recent article in The New Yorker about a woman, a gifted musician, who lost her ability to read music and then became unable to read any text without it transforming into strange "cuneiform or hieroglyphics" before her eyes. "Her ability to write, however, was quite unaffected, and she continued to maintain a large correspondence with former students and colleagues scattered throughout the world, though she depended increasingly on her husband to read the letters she received, and even to reread her own."
Mr. Engel, who lives in Toronto, has also come to rely on the kindness of others.
He has had friends and family members read parts of his work back to him, and worked with an editor at Penguin Canada who read aloud the full draft of his just-completed novel.
He also relies on shortcuts. The indentations at paragraph openings and the altered format of new chapters allow him to focus his memory on where a change might be needed. And using his computer to search for short keywords, such as a character's name, can enable him to home in on the relevant portion of text.
Aside from his scrambled reading process, the stroke left him physically unharmed, his speech unaltered, and his spatial relationships relatively normal, aside from the occasional miscue: "I might open the fridge to put in a dirty dish occasionally."
His therapy consists of various reading-speed drills, in which his therapist shows him lists of three- and four-letter words for short periods and tests his recall.
"It is a way of rebuilding, of having those neurons reconnect or connect in new ways," he explains. "I guess you have to let the brain delegate new areas for dealing with all this traffic."
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