Austinist Book Review: Samedi the Deafness by Jesse Ball

It is often said that the sign of a true master painter is how he or she chooses to deal with space and so-called "negative space." Amateurs feel compelled to fill up every inch of the canvas with detail; those more confident in their craft are able to leave empty space.

Similarly, writers like Kafka and Hemingway were often acknowledged for what they had left unsaid. Hemingway so mastered the practice of omission that he might as well have invented it.

In Samedi the Deafness, it's clear that author Jesse Ball—first time novelist, long time poet—has taken his cues from the sparse and often nondescript. Every single minutiae of detail that does not propel the story has been excised. The novel is stark, but far from empty.

The novel's main character, James Sim, and its enigmatic villain, Samedi, may call to mind Her Majesty's favorite MI-6 agent, but the book reads more like a novel that Miss Moneypenny would have cooked up while playing a game of Clue with Syd Barrett. One sunny morning, James, a professional mnemonist, comes across a dying man. As the man bleeds to death, having just been stabbed in the chest, he confesses to James, "I was one of them, but I left, and they didn't want me to leave. Have you seen the paper? Samedi? The conspirators? I was one of them...You must do it. You must expose them." Disturbed, James leaves and tries to forget the incident.

But then the "them" described by the dying man begin to commit suicide, one a day, in front of the White House. Each clutches a message from Samedi, declaring doom to come on the seventh day.