What is, what was, what might be

I recently found out that Jesse Ball won the 2008 Plimpton Prize for Fiction (Thanks, Firefly!), which seemed like as good excuse as any to reread Ball's novel Samedi the Deafness. Ball's novel is virtually impossible to categorize. A philistine might call it a mystery, someone with more pretension than me could venture the phrase 'prose-poem' that I hear way too much of lately.

What the book is, in my opinion, is a beautifully written exploration of Truth, and of how we know things that we think we Know. The reader and the protagonist, James Sim, are both kept on extremely shaky ground from the moment Sim encounters a wounded man in a public park. Things get progressively weirder throughout the book, until it is impossible to know who and what to believe.

The ending is a bit ambiguous, I suppose, but all stories have to end somewhere. And I'm pretty certain I know what was going to happen next, so my only disappointment was that I had to put the book down and move on to something else.

C-ro, my friend and erstwhile programming adviser, compared the underlying plot of Samedi to the classic graphic novel The Watchmen. So now I want to reread that and also The Things They Carried, another exploration of the nature of truth by Tim O'Brien. So add those to rereads to all the new books I'm working on

I'm still getting the hang of reviewing books without spoiling them. Feel free to let me have it in the comments.