John Brantingham Reviews
K. E. Semmel’s The Book of Losman
Santa Fe Writer’s Project, October 1, 2024
I love any novel that affirms courage and hope, especially when the world seems shoddy and evil. Kyle Semmel’s The Book of Losman (Santa Fe Writer’s Project) is such a book. At the outset, it doesn’t seem very hopeful. Daniel Losman is a divorced American man living in Copenhagen with joint custody of his three-year-old child. For a living, he translates Danish novels into English, and this profession suits him because he has Tourette syndrome, and his tics cause him to feel embarrassment and shame. However, he answers an ad for a study on his condition and finds that Dr. Pelin and Dr. Jens are developing an experimental drug called BhMe4 that will allow him, through his dreams, to access memories all the way back to his birth, so he can identify why the tics began, if there was a triggering incident, and to possibly cure himself of his condition. He journeys to these moments in his sleep while under the scrutiny of the medical professionals. He especially wants to go back to a memory where an early teacher shamed him for his tics. Losman is suffering, but as he works through this process, he finds a new way to see him, and as he begins to reject this process, he sees himself in a more holistic way. The Book of Losman is therefore not a book so much of loss and being lost as it is about hope and how Losman is able to reevaluate the shame-based approach to life that others have imposed on him; instead he finds a way into life’s richness that goes beyond binary ways of thinking and accepting other people’s diminishments as a kind of truth.
Losman’s predicament is the predicament that so many people find themselves in; he has internalized the prejudices of a society built on the premise that those who do not fit easily into society should be shamed so that they force themselves to hide that which they find shameful. There is nothing shameful about his condition, but again and again he has been forced to feel this way. The author himself has the same form of Tourette syndrome Losman has, so we are given a view into the condition that few other writers can give to us. So often we see insulting visions of the condition that are unrealistic and meant to be a punchline within a narrative. Worse, we are shown a Tourette syndrome narrative that is meant to be respectful but misses the reality. Losman is written by someone who knows the intricacies not only of the tics and mannerisms but the specific ways in which it is isolating. We are shown how he is mocked as a child by kids and how the adults’ reactions to his condition, which might or might not be well-meaning, help to fuel that bullying. We are shown the way that he internalizes these emotions and how he disappears into himself. The heart of the book is about the cultural component of the condition, which is the major difficulty of this and so many conditions. The syndrome is hard enough to manage on its own, but then there are social pressures that go along with it that can make life feel unbearable. There is no way to avoid these pressures, and in fact Losman trying to manage the reaction of random strangers is a losing game.
The new drug and Pelin and Jens miss the essence of the problem; it would of course be wonderful to live without Tourette syndrome, but they and Losman seem to be searching for a cure to Losman, as though his humanity should be corrected, and he might become somehow better because of it. It sees not just the condition, but the person as fixable, as though a person is a thing to be fixed and cured. Pelin states: “If you participate in our study, you will be transformed, trust me” (67). These doctors are not just promising a medical breakthrough but the transformation of the person into something greater than himself as though there is a sliding scale to humanity, and he is on the low end. They do not seem to understand the implications of what they’re saying, but that’s the gist. They are a part of a systemic problem where people’s value is determined by their conformity to social pressures. There is no amount of therapy or drug treatments Losman can do to fix this systemic problem. The only way to heal is to move out of this mind set. Not until Losman does this does he begin to feel more human. The magic of the book as I see it, is that Losman is able to do this. Semmel is giving us a vision of how to break out of toxic self-harm.
The Book of Losman ends with what I see as the ultimate hope: not that he will have a happy ending but that he’s moving emotionally to a place that denies this simplistic way of seeing his humanity. Losman becomes more than his conditions. He becomes more than social expectation. He becomes a person who recognizes humanity. Why I love this book is that it breaks away from the simplistic thinking that often dominates: that the goal of life is to be simply happy all the time, that people can or should be “cured” of outsider status, and that humans do not have intrinsic value. The Book of Losman is a novel of hope and great beauty.
About the Author: John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. He is the editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder.
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