AUTOPORTRAIT

Expanding his surreal oeuvre of tricky fiction and poetry, Ball finally tackles autobiography in an unexpected stylistic shift.

While the author’s previous books challenge literary conventions in dreamy, riddling prose, this book plays it straight. With mechanical simplicity, Ball composes his self-portrait with terse, confessional fragments rattled off in a trancelike deadpan. They quickly jump among ideas and, without paragraph breaks, amass into a tower of personal facts and reflections—e.g., “One of my shoulders stands higher than the other. My left hand is quicker than my right, but weaker. When I played soccer for my high school, I scored goals with both feet.” Despite its rigidity, the narrative is enjoyably personable and curiously mundane. Ball invites readers into a meditative engagement with the text and suggests that perhaps the best way to understand a person is to sift through their mental clutter. Koan-like moments hum throughout: “I like the rain, but I don’t like for my things to be wet”; “I like to leave windows open, but am concerned about insects coming into rooms”; “I don’t like to cheat at games, but I am not incredibly angry when I discover other people have cheated.” Ball takes his cue from a book of the same name by Édouard Levé, a French writer and visual artist who notoriously took his own life 10 days after delivering the manuscript for a book called Suicide. Ball explains in the foreword that he admires how Levé’s Autoportrait approaches biography in a way that “does not raise one fact above another, but lets the facts stand together in a fruitless clump, like a life.” While Levé’s book is difficult and cathartic, Ball’s is gentler and more considerate of readers. “I think it is important,” he writes, “to read something and to take it entirely into your body and find yourself changed by its company.”

A hypnotic personal reflection penned with clockwork discipline.