Books like Samedi the Deafness

”I don’t know what to think, said James. It’s all rather strange to me.”My first experience of Jesse Ball was in Granta’s “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017. Here, I read the short work, “A Wooden Taste Is the Word for Dam a Wooden Taste Is the Word for Dam a Wooden Taste Is the Word For”. In fact, I read it three or four times trying to make sense of it.Those who know me will know that meant I was hooked - I do love a book that makes no sense. In my review of that magazine, I said “…you have to like your reading to have surreal element if you are going to like Jesse Ball's contribution.” But it took a while for Ball to then reel me in as I got side-tracked by other books until I picked up Census about a year later and then The Divers’ Game more recently which prompted me to explore more of Ball’s work.So, here we are at the beginning. Ball’s debut novel, published in 2007, a full 10 years before the bizarre short story that first captured my interest.And it’s a weird one. Jesse Ball has a remarkable ability to write in a way feels simultaneously carefully planned and completely spontaneous. Never once does it feel like the story is getting out of the author’s control. But the book is so full of plot twists and turns and bizarre events that it feels as though, like Murakami, Ball is making it all up as he goes along. I have read in some interviews with Ball that he “saw” the story he tells here in his mind’s eye and essentially just sat down and wrote it out: what we read is, in essence, a first draft.All this adds up to a sense of shifting foundations. Or perhaps no foundations. The reader quickly learns that nothing is trustworthy. Indeed, we spend a lot of the book in a “verisylum” which is an institution for the treatment of chronic liars.Take a step back. James Sim discovers a dying man in a park and that man’s final words link his murder to a terrorist conspiracy. Elsewhere, men keep arriving, one a day, at the White House where they commit suicide whilst carrying a warning note signed by the eponymous Samedi. Very quickly, James is drawn in a web of intrigue and deception where absolutely nothing is what it seems to be. As he follows clues, he finds himself at the verisylum where it becomes increasingly difficult for both him and the reader to know what is true and what is a lie. For the reader, it is safest to assume that everything you read will turn out to be false and several new versions of potential truths will be presented on subsequent pages. Several times I thought about the TV series 24 where it seems no matter how trapped the bad guys are, there is always another hidden escape: the plot of this book feels very much like that. If you accept that and go along for the ride, it is actually tremendous fun.With the odd flashback to James’ childhood, including a talking owl, and a strange episode where James calls his wife to ask if he is actually at home asleep in his bed and dreaming, everything is often rather surreal. And, by the way, his wife says he is asleep at home. But then the phone turns out not to be real. Read this telephone episode carefully, though, as your thoughts will return to it when you read the final page. Ball takes great delight in language and often uses phrases or sentences that add to the reader’s confusion - there are several points in the book where you sit up straight and go back thinking “What did I just read? And what does it mean?”. You can re-read it to answer the first question, but you may not be able to answer the second.I took great delight in reading this book. The key comparisons I have seen that resonate with me are with David Lynch, Hitchcock and my very limited understanding of Kafka (I bought a copy of The Trial whilst reading this as I realised I need to address my lamentable lack of Kafka experience). Those are three very big names to be compared with! It could have got rather predictably unpredictable once I realised everything was going to turn out to be a lie, but it didn’t. Get predictably unpredictable or all turn out to be a lie.