As It Ought To Be

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.