Jesse Ball and the banning toupee

The release of a book by Jesse Ball (New York, 1978) is always cause for celebration, and the new edition of his novel Curfew —published in Argentina in 2012—is no exception. A poet and storyteller, this peaceful anarchist who also considers himself an "absurdist" stands out as one of the most original works in North American literature in recent years.

Eclectic in his approach, Ball is capable of conceiving a manual on lucid dreaming for children, lonely people, and prisoners to illuminate a grey existence (Sleep, Brother of Death); of repeating the formula outlined by Edouard Levé to write an autobiography in which the very diverse events share a common hierarchy ( Self-Portrait ); of designing an authentic adolescent and revolutionary voice ( How to Start a Fire and Why ); or of narrating a fiction interwoven with the chronicle, in which the strange mutism of a Japanese man accused of a crime is investigated ( When the Silence Began ). His writing is as hypnotic as his pace is frenetic, and Curfew , with its sharp and simultaneously ethereal prose, its typographical games and a strong presence of dialogue, shines in the Ball constellation on its own merits.

William Drysdale knew how to be a master violinist. Life with his beloved and perceptive wife, Louisa, and Molly—their mute, innocent, though far from naive daughter—was rich in those sparks that transform routine into a pleasant everyday adventure. Without knowing exactly how, and with the tacit consent of the population, a de facto government—which, in its omnipresence, becomes Kafkaesquely invisible—prohibits all types of artistic gatherings and recreation, including, of course, music. Not content with this, it encourages blind compliance with strategies exemplified by State Terror: the forced disappearance of people and murder at the hands of the secret police. For several years now, Louisa has been kidnapped, and William must earn his living as an "epitaphorist": he is responsible, with the mastery of a man sensitive to art, for writing epitaphs according to the particular characteristics of the deceased.

The curfew has been in place since no one knows exactly when, keeping the community on edge. Whispers are the common mode of communication, and appearances—reading a newspaper, dressing or walking a certain way—are the uniform of everyday life. But all Power sooner or later encounters resistance of some kind. The transmission of a method to almost drip-penetrate the system; the more or less coded messages that William can slip into his epigrammatic and final writing; or the artistic expression of a clandestine puppet theater that Molly develops thanks to an elderly couple of neighbors. Dissident forms, to put it in the words of one of the characters, carried out by people who need to consider how things are before simply submitting to them.

Unlike the few visible institutions that, like the school Molly attends, aim to automate the individual, turning them into a cog that operates through repetition and fear, art enables a postulation: faced with the uncertainty and violence of the situation, the artist concocts a world under their control and around their desire; a personal imagination, of course, although contaminated by contingency since, for someone like Jesse Ball , private facts are intertwined with social and political ones.

Thus, assisted by the puppeteer neighbor and his wife, Molly writes the script for a puppet show in which fiction and reality overlap; since it is there—in art—where the process of private and communal drama is elaborated; the stage, in short, where the disappeared reappear, the characters challenge the degree of fiction inscribed in every person, and creativity mischievously stirs, like what it is: the quintessential faculty of resistance.

Curfew , Jesse Ball. Translated Carlos Gardini. Stealth, 216 pages.