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Jesse Ball’s new novel, Samedi the Deafness, is about Ansilon the imaginary owl and a lame-legged cat named Xerxes, Cavendish, Benvolio, or Mephisto alternately. The two spend their unlikely friendship on dead-end docks, catching the strains of carnival music for a respite from the obligations of consciousness.
Or perhaps no, not at all. But in Ball’s world, nothing should be trusted – dreams, lies, and truth form an uncertain alliance. Certainties…let’s try to put them together.
James Sim, a solitary, slightly stuffy mnemonist, finds a crumpled man fatally wounded in the park. With his last breaths, the man chokes out hints that could uncover a threatening cabal. James retreats in consternation to a diner, where he is approached by a beguiling girl who claims her name is Anastasia. Soon James begins to follow the dead man’s clues. He is muscled into a car and brought to a strange institution guided by a host of arbitrary rules and filled with possible conspirators and chronic liars.
But this all sounds terribly serious. In fact, the book is written with a delightful, restrained black wit. Ball writes of James’ father, “That day his father became very ill and was never the same again. In fact, he died within the hour.” The narration is quiet, dry, and tidy – I imagine Mr. Ball as a painter of tiny figurines, applying precious, miniscule brush strokes to each character. He includes quirky phrases, such as, “She smiled, a delicate smile like a bookish otter.”
Frequently, the narrator throws in a little riddle with phrases that sit on the page slightly nonsensical. These riddles seem to have their own foreign logic. Between swaths of dialogue, Ball narrates, “A dark name like a walking stick broken in anger.” No explanation is given, but it fits. The plot conspires with the style to further disorient. As in the films of surrealist directors Guy Maddin and the Brothers Quay, there is an air of perversity and inscrutability that hangs around the asylum.
Ball is a playful author, and he enjoys subtly undermining and calling attention to the mechanics of writing. In Samedi, a nurse refuses to talk to James and then “smiled in a really fabulous way.” This description is jarringly empty, but rich in illustration of how we speak versus how novelists write.
The text holds a prodigious number of shalls, upons, and rathers for a contemporary novel written by – surprise! – an American. Just try to read this passage in anything but a British accent: “There is a feeling things have when use is not being put where it might. Shall I say the world soon bore this feeling? Yes, the world bore this feeling like a loose scarf that flaps insolently against one’s perhaps too frivolously jacketed shoulder.”
I could not manage it. The strength of Ball’s European affectation is so strong that it has even pervaded this review, I dare say.
After the bewitching strangeness of the majority of the book, the ending is disappointingly clear and predictable. Its greatest flaw is that it contains a much larger number of surprises for its protagonist than it does for us, the readers. When Ball succeeds, we are with James on his tortuous path – when he fails, we are watching a mouse in a maze and wondering when the little critter is going to catch on.
Perhaps Ball is playing it safe, though — the reader is never irredeemably lost, never so bamboozled that she drops the book or writes it off as merely atmospheric. In fact, the book is incredibly engaging. I found myself dreading the end of the slim volume, wanting to stay lost in Ball’s labyrinth with James and the whimsical, intoxicating Grieve (or is it Anastasia?). I laughed aloud, was sometimes quietly moved, and fell into the feverish innocence and mystery of Samedi, remaining both detached and extremely interested. I only wish there was more.
As for Ansilon the owl and the many-named cat – they are indeed characters in the book. But the stuff about docks, carnival music and the like, that’s all balderdash. A kernel of truth and all that. |
