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A Cure For Suicide

A Cure For Suicide 1

by Jesse Ball
Paperback
Publication Date: 24/06/2015
3/5 Rating 1 Review

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From the acclaimed author of Silence Once Begun comes a beguiling new novel about a man starting over at the most basic level, and the strange woman who insinuates herself into his life and memory.


A man and a woman have moved into a small house in a small village. The woman is an 'examiner', the man, her 'claimant'. The examiner is both doctor and guide, charged with teaching the claimant a series of simple functions: this is a chair, this is a fork, this is how you meet people. She makes notes in her journal about his progress. He is showing improvement, but his dreams are troubling. One day, the examiner brings him to a party, and here he meets Hilda, a charismatic but volatile woman whose surprising assertions throw everything the claimant has learned into question. What is this village? Why is he here? And who is Hilda?


A fascinating novel of love, illness, despair and betrayal, A Cure for Suicide is the most captivating novel yet from this audacious and original writer.
ISBN:
9781925240030
9781925240030
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
24-06-2015
Publisher:
Text Publishing
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
250
Dimensions (mm):
234x153x18mm
Weight:
0.32kg
Jesse Ball

Jesse Ball's many works of absurdity and radicalism have been published in more than a dozen languages. He was selected as one of Granta magazine's Best of Young American Novelists in 2017. His novel Census won the Gordon Burn Prize in 2018. He lives in Chicago.

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“Time passed. After some number of days, one particular day arrived, and in the midst of that day, it was midday. The sun was shining so brightly overhead it seemed that every blade of grass could be made out, each from the others. It was a sort of harmony – nothing could be hidden, nothing at all beneath the sky”.

A Cure For Suicide is the fifth novel by prize-winning American author, Jesse Ball. It begins with a nameless man (the claimant) who is living in a house in a village (Gentlest Village) where he is taught the basic activities of daily living by a doctor/guide (the examiner). The claimant is told he almost died, and is now being healed. The Process of Villages is the treatment he will undergo, the cure for suicide. Set somewhere far into the future, or in a parallel universe, Ball’s world, and certainly many of the character names, have a slightly Scandinavian feel to it (perhaps not surprising, given his Icelandic wife).

If the reader can get past the first (somewhat bizarre) two thirds of the novel, then the discussion between the petitioner and the interlocutor forms an explanation of how the nameless man came to be going through the Process of Villages. While the lack of quotation marks for speech can be irritating, it is generally not a barrier to understanding who is speaking, except during the discussion with the interlocutor, when conversations reported at third or fourth remove create quite complicated sentences.

Ball’s style is simple and stark, but his descriptive prose is, nonetheless, evocative: “She sat at a desk with her back to him, writing long into the night as she always did. The light from the fixture in that room was shabby. It fell very bitterly over the room, and some of the light from a lamp in the street contested with it. The effect was: as she sat at her desk she looked like a figure in a woodcut. And she sat as still” and “The manager, a yellowed, rancid sort of man, the type who seldom clip his nails, who believes they need be clipped less often than you and I do….”are two examples.

Ball describes a world where depression and heartbreak appear to be eliminated by amnesiac treatments: what led to the nameless man’s therapy is a moving tale, and perhaps Ball is leading the reader to consider the ethics of medicalising grief. The conclusion will leave the reader wondering about the sincerity (or otherwise) of a key character. An interesting read. 3.5 stars

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