Amnesia the first novel by Douglas Anthony Cooper

Douglas Anthony Cooper

Douglas Anthony Cooper is a writer originally from Canada, who lived for many years in New York City and currently resides in Oaxaca, Mexico. He trained in philosophy and architecture, and these are the areas that dominate his novels, which are generally placed in the category of postmodern fiction...

, chronicles the unraveling of a Toronto family and the amnesiac girl who undoes its scion, Izzy Darlow. The novel is obsessive and fragmentary—a structurally complex work opposing the manic power of Eros to the compulsive need to forget.

Reviewed by Michiko Kakutani

Michiko Kakutani

is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times and is considered by many to be a leading literary critic in the United States.-Life and career:...

 of the New York Times, its "elliptical narrative style recalls works by D.M. Thomas, Paul Auster

Paul Auster

Paul Benjamin Auster is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy , Moon Palace , The Music of Chance , The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies...

, Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child...

 and Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

," and as a postmodern addition to the genre of architectural fiction, it combines Cooper's study of architecture and philosophy. Cooper deals with memory theory throughout the novel, and emphasizes its relationship to classical rhetoric. He studied Latin rhetoric, and was a serious competitive debater in college at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

—he was Canadian National Champion

Canadian National Debating Championship

The Canadian National Debating Championship is the premier university debating championship in Canada, sanctioned by the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate. It has been held since 1978, always in the Canadian parliamentary debating style...

 in 1985, and Runner-Up Best Speaker at the 1985 World Championships

World Universities Debating Championship

The World Universities Debating Championship is the world's largest debating tournament, and one of the largest annual international student events in the world. It is a parliamentary debating event, held using the British Parliamentary Debate format. Each year, the event is hosted by a university...

.

Amnesia gained a following among architecture students and academic theorists, and Cooper has been deeply involved in the architectural community as an artistic collaborator.
Published to good reviews, it was a national bestseller in Canada and shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award.

Amnesia was published for Amazon's Kindle in 2011.

External links

• Review clips of Douglas Anthony Cooper's Novels
• Dysmedia - Cooper's Home Page