"How do we keep one another's company? How might our lives unfold
alongside those of our parents with Alzheimer's nearby? In Arno Geiger's
exquisite memoir, he lets us into the private and sometimes sacred space
he found in the company of his father--a relationship nurtured by his
own willingness to share a mutual solitude, and to visit those places
where his father's spirit was broken and where it thrived. The tender
stories in The Old King in His Exile hold the quiet love
between these men, and invite the reader to apprehend more of what it
can mean, even in our final days, to be alive." --Adrian Nicole Leblanc,
author of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in
the Bronx
Arno Geiger's father was never an easy man to know. Born into a farming
family in Austria and conscripted into World War Two as a
seventeen-year-old "schoolboy soldier," he was later reticent about the
past. When he started to change, Arno assumed it was due to the effects
of aging and the breakup of a thirty-year marriage. But it turned out to
be more than that.
As Arno Geiger writes in this heartbreaking and insightful memoir of his
father's later years, "Alzheimer's is an illness that, like everything
of significance, tells us about a lot more than just itself. Human
characteristics and society's mores are enlarged by the illness as if in
a magnifying glass. The world is confusing to all of us, and when you
look at it with a clear eye you see that the difference between the
healthy and the sick is simply the degree to which they are able to
conceal the confusion on the surface." Knowing that his father won't ask
for help, Arno sets out on a journey to get to know his father at last.
Arno remains at his side, listens to his words that are often full of
wonderful, unexpected poetry, and discovers that despite everything, his
father has not lost his wit, charm, and self-assurance.
Awash with light, full of life and surprising insights, and often very
funny, The Old King In His Exile is a wonderfully affecting story that
will offer solace to anyone who has struggled with losing an aging loved
one.
