SOURCE: A review of Amnesia, in Quill and Quire, Vol. 58, No. 5, May, 1992, p. 19.

[Jones is a novelist. Below, he favorably reviews Amnesia.]

An archivist, who suffers from amnesia, sits in his office. He is to be married in four hours. A stranger, Izzy Darlow, enters the office and, for the next several hours, relates his life story to the archivist. The archivist subsequently misses his own wedding.

This is, ostensibly, the plot of Douglas Cooper's first novel, Amnesia. Through Izzy's story, however, Cooper explores a bewildering variety of themes and subjects: storytelling and its relation to memory, obsession, and madness, and the landscape of Toronto, to name a few.

Izzy's story is centred on his dysfunctional family. Physically isolated from one another by the very design of their labyrinthine house in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood, the family members are free to develop their eccentricities. Izzy's brother, Aaron, conducts elaborate...