English, Scottish, & Welsh Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Phases of Life - Fiction

The Amnesia Clinic

Name: The Amnesia Clinic
Author: James Scudamore
ISBN: 9780151012657

by James Scudamore

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Overview

Anti and Fabián are best friends and classmates at the Quito International School. Anti (short for Anthony) is the quiet, asthmatic English kid, and Fabián is the charismatic and flamboyant local. Anti lives in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents, while Fabián lives with his cool, eccentric Uncle Suarez. Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales. Before long, the relationship between these two fifteen-year-olds becomes one conducted entirely through the medium of storytelling, and they lose sight of the boundaries between fact and fiction.

With confused emotions and a tenuous grip on reality, the boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an “Amnesia Clinic” that may or may not exist. A complex and beautifully crafted piece of storytelling about storytelling itself, The Amnesia Clinic explores how truth can be so very much more fanciful than fact, and how the collision between fantasy and reality can lead to harmful delusions.

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly

This debut, set in Ecuador, mines the rich territory of the secret lives of teenage boys. Anti, an English expatriate, is a student at the Quito International School, where he meets Fabi n, a talented and attractive classmate. Fabi n takes a surprise liking to Anti, and the two soon develop a language and world of their own, in which the lines between reality and fiction blur. In the compelling stories within this story, Fabi n returns time and again to his parents' deaths, convinced his mother escaped the fiery car crash that also killed his father. Anti, seeking to calm his friend's increasingly wild speculations, produces a fake newspaper clipping about an amnesia clinic where victims of memory loss are cared for. The two go in search of the clinic, where they imagine, or pretend, they might find Fabi n's mother. Their trip, which begins as a promising and fun escape, eventually goes awry, leaving Anti to patch together a suitable story from the wreckage. Scudamore admirably portrays the braggadocio, sexual fantasies and obsessions of 15-year-old boys. Like his characters, he is a fast, funny, efficient storyteller; he appears more comfortable in the book's lighter first half than in its darker conclusion. Nonetheless, this story is tough to forget. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

About the Author, James Scudamore

JAMES SCUDAMORE spent a peripatetic childhood in Japan, Brazil, Ecuador, and the United Kingdom, after which he graduated from Oxford University with a first-class degree in modern languages and completed an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. The Amnesia Clinic is his first novel. He lives in London.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Library Journal

Fabián and Anti are unlikely friends. The 15-year-old Fabián is a native Ecuadorian orphan living with his exotic Uncle Saurez in Quito's Old Town, while pudgy, asthmatic Anti (short for Anthony) resides with his English parents in a modern international compound. What binds them together is a willingness to submerge themselves in storytelling. Aided and abetted by Suarez's own storytelling abilities, the teenagers augment their mundane lives with seemingly impossible possibilities. All is well until Anti's mother suddenly decides that he is losing his British identity and must return to England, and Anti, in a gesture intended to support Fabián, creates a fake newspaper account of an amnesia clinic in Peru. Wanting one more adventure together, the boys go in search of the clinic. No longer sure whether what either believes is real or fantasy, they alternate between pushing away and pulling together. Narrated by Anti, with constant revisions winding through the story, Scudamore's first novel is reminiscent of Yann Martel's Life of Pi, raising questions about truth, illusion, and the power of stories. Recommended for all fiction collections.
—Jan Blodgett

Kirkus Reviews

In this tragic coming-of-age tale, storytelling exalts, but also kills. Fifteen-year-old Fabi n, spoiled, orphaned, rebellious and cute, is a fabulist given to spinning yarns about shaman ancestors. Anti, asthmatic and timorous, is enthralled. And given debut novelist Scudamore's narrative skill, so is the reader. Living with his surgeon uncle in 1990s Quito-home, according to Ecuadorian legend, of an Incan city in the clouds-Fabi n's a raffish show-off, capable of tying "knots in a capuli stalk with his tongue"; he's also a charming liar. A born sidekick, Anti's an ex-pat in flight from drab England with his journalist father and his mother, a psychologist studying mestizo culture. He worships Ecuador and Fabi n, so much so that his parents threaten to return him to England's duller, but more salubrious, air. Dazzling Fabi n has his own sorrow; he weeps in secret over his parents. Drunk one night, he tells Anti of their demise: His father, after being gored in a bullfight, was being rushed to the hospital by his mother when the car crashed, his mother hurled from the wreck. Convinced she's still alive, Fabi n enlists Anti to join him in a cross-country trek-a final Ecuadorian idyll for the Brit and a chance for Fabi n to search for his mother, secluded, he believes, in an amnesia clinic in the hills. Teenage runaway fantasies ensue as the boys embark-Fabi n's wild night in a brothel, Anti's spicy initiation into the ways of love courtesy of Sally Lightfoot, a hippie adventuress who's also a bounty hunter of whales. In an echo, perhaps a bit too reminiscent, of John Knowles's A Separate Peace, golden-boy Fabi n ends up the victim of his desperate belief in the power of myth-making andtale-telling to compensate for the disappointments of real life. An effective blend of the magical and the creepy.