"John Schad has written a moving memoir of his father's life, taking as his starting point the last traumatic years (1992-96) marked by panicked and perplexing utterances prompted by the onset of Alzheimer's ⦠Schad has threaded through this intimate portrait of a dying father an elaborate engagement with the philosophy of deconstruction, and with a history of Oxford from the 1930s to the present. Creative writing, life writing and literary theory are brought together in this challenging text. Schad does three things. He tells his father's story from schoolboy to Oxford undergraduate to Methodist turned Presbyterian minister to final dramatic demise. He interlaces his father's life with the work of Jacques Derrida, drawing extensively on one of Derrida's many experiments with the confessional mode, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987), a puzzling book, part novel, part philosophical treatise, loaded with diary fragments and postcards from the edge that are richly suggestive and resonant in relation to Schad's father's life â¦. Between these two father figures Schad lays out a latticework of links involving the Second World War, anti-Semitism, blackmail, betrayal, horror, guilt, history, martyrdom, memory (false and faithful), resurrection and secrecy. The whole thing is framed by a piece of archival detective-work in the Bodleian to solve an Oxford mystery that would have Inspector Morse scratching his head. Major figures of the period like Gilbert Ryle, C.
S. Lewis, and Hugh Trevor-Roper put in appearances in a work full of fascinating vignettes of academic in-fighting and high-table gossip. Schad shows the extent to which faith and reason are intertwined in the lives of his father and the philosopher who has shaped his son's thinking, while bringing to vivid life a whole post-war intellectual milieu. ⦠One wonders what 'Shad' would have thought of his larger than life reincarnation in the pages of his son's academic experiment. Schad cites Freud to the effect that 'History is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas' (p. 70). In its evocation of death and suffering, Someone Called Derrida is at once an intensely personal story and a tale of trauma that touches on larger issues of history and identity. It was Nietzsche who said, 'When one hasn't had a good father, it is necessary to invent one'.
Schad had two good fathers, but that, happily, has not prevented him from being inventive." - The Glass.