The Memory Garden of Miguel Carranza

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Much of the action in Ottawa writer Hassan’s new novel takes place in
and around a backyard swimming pool, and perhaps this is as it should
be, given the watery, murky sensibilities through which the story
unfolds. Carranza, an insomnia-ridden Toronto neurosurgeon, has lost his
teenage son Jaime to suicide. Jaime’s death haunts the surgeon,
especially since the schizophrenia that induced it went undiagnosed.
This is the novel’s underlying theme: Hassan wants to be sure we
understand that there is indeed a world of the mind beyond that probed
by the surgeon’s scalpel: “Located at a remoter threshold, inside
the skull is another zone far away from its own self, where perhaps the
mind floats like a whale with its ambiguous island back, rises above the
surface, brings in its train all the splendid array of its elegance and
immensity from the depths of the seas.

Jaime inhabited this zone, as did Albert Shaker, the amputee with
“phantom limb” pain in whose skull Carranza plants electrodes,
rendering the patient pain-free but also mindless, with “little grey
clouds floating through his head.” Shaker, too, succumbs to suicide.

Carranza’s “memory garden” is inhabited by creatures from this
“remoter threshold of the mind”: huge birds of prey, scaly reptiles,
shadows at the bottom of the pool. Hassan does fine things with these
surreal images, rendering them black and frightening. The surgeon’s
insomnia provides a fertile field for a paradoxical dreaming wakefulness
in which the mind’s terrors provide a frightening harvest. The
author’s expertise with medical terms and procedures, particularly
those involving neurosurgery, is impressive; one wonders whether he has
taken a crash course. Recommended.