My fifth book and second in the English language.
Obsessed by Alzheimer’s, after having read David Shenk’s the Forgetting and Jonathan’s Frantzen’s How to be Alone, I delved into an extensive research trying to find out more about the disease. How was it first diagnosed? By whom? Was there a person named Alzheimer? The more I searched for answers, the more I was drawn to the persona of Alois Alzheimer.
Having located his late grand daughter in Grossbettlingen outside Stuttgart, I took a late afternoon flight from Heathrow and arrived in Stuttgart. From there I took a taxi to Grossbettlingen and arrived at a petrol station which rented rooms on the first floor. As from the next day I would embark in a meeting with an unknown lady who happened to be the granddaughter of Alois Alzheimer. Ilse Libelein.
The moment the lovely, smiling lady, standing opposite me opened the door of her house the next morning, I knew that I knocked on the right door.
I was warmly welcomed by Alzheimer’s lovely granddaughter, who, not only disclosed to me the life of such an important and humble personality as her grandfather’s, but also exhibited a horizon of an unlimited kindness and grace.
Intrigued ever since, by the memory thief and the man whose name it took after, I began my journey to Alzheimer’s world trying to comprehend better the intricacies of the human brain, man’s only real identity.
Seven years later, having finished the first draft, I hope that soon I will have the book ready. Though editing a book about the brain, can be a never ending story. A palimpsest, where one scratches, the more one discovers underneath.