The Lesson

by Jesse Ball

A Vintage Short 

Loring is a widow and chess master who makes her living giving chess lessons; her newest student, who might be a prodigy, bears a striking resemblance to her dead spouse. Has her chess champion husband found a final move beyond the grave? 

A chess fable from the wildly inventive, immensely talented author of A Cure for Suicide and Silence Once Begun, “The Lesson” is a surprising, poignant, macabre tale of games, children, and the unknowability of the beyond. Channeling the chess masterpieces of Nabokov and Stefan Zweig, Jesse Ball’s newest is a fabulous and entertaining novella that astonishes from first move to last.

An eBook short.

Genres: Short Stories

138 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 3, 2015

About the author

Jesse Ball (1978-) Born in New York. The author of fourteen books, most recently, the novel How To Set a Fire and Why. His prizewinning works of absurdity have been published to acclaim in many parts of the world and translated into more than a dozen languages. The recipient of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize, as well as fellowships from the NEA, the Heinz foundation, and others, he is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is a weird little read. it's 138 pages long, so it falls somewhere between a novel and a novella, and its contents are equally tricky to define or summarize. i'm not sure what the reader is meant to be left with after reading it, apart from a vague feeling of melancholy and a ton of questions.

as a reader, i think i may have outgrown surrealism. i do still enjoy magical realism, but i'm no longer intrigued by the unusual for its own sake, if there's no resolution towards which that unusual is driving.

i'm not sure i'm feeling anything at all about this story.

i requested this from netgalley because i had enjoyed two of jesse ball's books before - March Book, which is poetry, and Vera & Linus, which is a beautifully-designed book of linked dreamlike vignettes. i've been meaning to read one of his novel-novels, but you know how it is when there are so many books in the world, so when i saw this one i figured it would be a good place to finally revisit him.

and it starts out fine, with an intriguing premise of possible reincarnation: five years after the death of ezra, her husband of forty-five years, loring is hired to develop the talents of a five-year-old chess prodigy named stan. she comes to believe stan is channelling or containing some version of ezra who seems to be trying to communicate with her behind stan's own self. loring and stan form a friendship based around chess, loneliness, and a mysterious box ezra left to be opened after his death, but which loring has never touched.

it's a compact little story of grief and hope, magic and delusion which puts loring and the reader into the same position; assuming a willingness from both parties to believe that the impossible is actually happening, of wishing making it so.

but about halfway through it starts to lose focus and stray into an episodic series of seemingly unconnected image-heavy chapters no longer concentrated in the main drag of the storyline, involving hot air balloon jubilees and circus performers and strange encounters in the cemetery with people of blurred relations and if any of this is symbolism, it's opaque to me.

this story is supposedly "Channeling the chess masterpieces of Nabokov and Stefan Zweig," both of whom are authors i have read and enjoyed without having read either of their chess novels, so if this is meant to be an homage, it is equally lost on me.

it's not unenjoyable - the writing is lovely, especially when it focuses on the grieving process, specifically how the death of a loved one messes with our sense of self:

…she was the same person, and in the same way, as though he were still beholding her and keeping her to the idea of her that he had always had.

and the characters are sad and flawed in a really appealing way.

it's just a little frustrating to have so much unresolved. i don't mind ambiguity in general, but considering there are passages like this one where the potential for misunderstanding is intentionally suppressed:

So, she sat there awhile in the night until she was too tired to sit, and then she lay down, and soon fell asleep. When she woke it was the morning, and at least ten birds were in the tree above her head.

They were doing that bird thing that involves sleeping with the head under one wing. Another way of writing the above sentence would be, when she woke it was the morning, and ten headless birds were draped throughout the tree above her head. Of course, that would be misleading in the extreme, as when she woke, they woke too, and one after another beheld the glittering day.

it's just a little disappointing to not have some of the larger questions equally addressed, and it feels insubstantial at the end of it all.

so, yeah - i'm not sure what this is, or why, but it hasn't turned me off of the plan to read more of his books, because i still don't feel as though i have.

come to my blog!

[Esil · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Lesson is sweet, sad and surreal -- but it didn't really engage me. Ultimately, I found it a bit flat. It's the story of an elderly couple of chess masters -- Ezra and Loring. Ezra dies at the very beginning, and the rest of the novella focuses on Loring and the chess lessons she gives to 5 year old Stan. There's far more than chess involved in the lessons, as Loring starts to see Ezra in Stan. The story is infused with Loring's grief and longing for Ezra, and it's hard to tell where Loring's inner life and musings end, and where reality begins. It's well written and contains some powerful moments, but I often found my interest waning. It felt a bit more like a thought experiment than an engaging piece of literature. 3 stars nevertheless for the quality of the writing. Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for an opportunity to read an advance copy of The Lesson.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elderly chess masters, the husband dies and the widow is left with a box that she is not to open until a year after his death. At first it seems she is adjusting well from his death, visiting his grave and even accepting a new student, a five year old with it seems little talent. But...... and here we are into la la land. He does have one factor that the old woman is keyed on.

Not sure what this little novella means, unbearable grief, I get that. Wanting to believe something to find some hope, okay. But then there is a strange street circus, balloons flying in the sky and possibly a horrific accident, did this happen or not? A group of children that seem to attach to the young boys mother, who are they? Got me,.

Interesting, surrealistic, strange , well I can go on and on with adjectives, but somehow compelling. Wanted to see where this was going, and it went, just not sure where.

ARC from Netgalley.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A grieving elderly widow sees her deceased husband in the eyes of a young boy who visits her once a week for chess lessons - yes, this moving novella can be used to play Jesse-Ball-bingo, as we have a child protagonist, the questioning of reality, grief, human cruelty, a symbolic animal, and even the recurring circus theme. All of Ball's texts explore how people treat each other, especially how they indulge in pointless cruelty against those who are weaker than themselves, and what loss and grief do to the human soul. If you want to understand Ball, your key text is his very personal tribute to his dead brother Abram, Census.

When it comes to The Lesson, the comparison to Zweig made in the blurb is pretty misleading: Of course, chess is also used as a metaphor for sanity, but Ball employs it very differently than Zweig in Chess Story (which, btw, is a perfect novella you absolutely must read if you haven't yet). Loring, the widow at the center of Ball's book, was married to a chess master, and she is supposed to instruct 5-year-old Stan. As the story progresses, it becomes more and more unclear whether Stan is an incarnated version of the chess master, or whether Loring is losing her mind over her grief. The voice of the third-person-narrator is sometimes used as a character in itself (stating things like "I am taking back my calling Dr. Matthew's superstition nonsense. Superstitions may be quite useful."), another narrative device Ball likes to work with.

I have to admit that I found it mildly entertaining to scroll through other reviews that stated that this book is enigmatic and hard to grasp, because by the standards of this author, this is as in-your-face as it gets. While the short text is certainly a worthwhile read, it's not Ball's strongest effort. Still, this author can do no wrong: He is whip-smart AND has a distinct, free-wheeling poetic voice. What a writer.

[Larry H · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was torn between giving this one and two stars, so I thought I'd be generous.

Sometimes a book clicks for you and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you devour a book and sometimes you can't seem to make headway and just want the whole thing to end. Sadly, it was the latter for me where Jesse Ball's "The Lesson" was concerned. I was intrigued by the concept of this 137-page novella, but the story never engaged me, and I'll admit that I struggled to really understand the point of it all.

Ezra and his wife, Loring, were chess masters. Following Ezra's death, Loring continues giving chess lessons, both as a way of making ends meet, and as a small source of companionship in her old age. When she agrees to teach a young boy, Stan, she is immediately intrigued by him. It's not long before she is convinced that somehow Stan is the embodiment of her late husband.

When you lose someone you love so dearly, someone with whom you've spent so much of your life, the idea of their coming back in one form or another is definitely appealing. As Loring begins seeing more evidence that supports her belief about Stan, she wonders if this is the truth or if her mind is simply seeing what it wants to.

The problem with this story is that it meanders all over the place. It's a reflection on grief, love, and loss, and look at how societies treat the elderly. It's also a commentary on what dreams are, why games can be important to both adults and children, and the importance of belief in things that can't quite be explained, such as magic. But far too often, Ball veers from the core of his story into random details that he picks up and drops just as quickly, which made it very difficult to comprehend. Here's one example:

"The caretaker was there, and saw her walking. He came up, and with him his wife and daughter. This wife and this daughter, they were the same person, by a series of odd coincidences, but we will not go into that at the moment."

I've never read anything by Ball before, so I don't know if he was being deliberately obtuse and mysterious with the way he told this particular story, or if this is the way he writes. I was expecting a story about human emotion and perhaps a little mystery, and while I did find a bit of the former, much of the story left me disconnected and frustrated.

See all of my reviews at http://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blo....

[Andy Weston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loring and her husband Ezra were chess-masters, and when Ezra dies Loring in an effort to overcome some of her grief decides to offer lessons. The mother of a 5 year old, Stan, wants her tutoring services for her son, who, she believes, is a prodigy. It so happens the boy was born at the exact same time that Ezra died.

It is clear to Loring pretty soon that young Stan is no prodigy, but she enjoys his company, and he, hers. Over the weeks they have seven lessons, each of a day, though Loring, in her interest in the boy, is pursuing another agenda.

Written lightly, with an absurdist style typical of Ball, and in short chapters, this is best enjoyed as a fable, though it is also a meditation on chess. It addresses loss and grief, how society treats old people, and challenges traditional religious beliefs.

Here’s a clip..

—Did you ask the man to deliver that wing? asked Stan.
He sat on the floor and stared up at Loring, who sat in the chair. They were in the middle of talking about pawn formations.
—Of course, she said. I thought it would be good for you, once in your life, to open a package and find something that you could never predict. It will change how you open packages from now on. The delivery of the package: that was today's lesson.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim novella of slim, but potent, charms. It doesn't carry the same weight as Ball's longer work - but the magic and mystery of his best writing is present, especially in the back half. Worth it for completists, maybe not so much for those looking to see if Ball is right for them.

(also, my partner and I did a whole thing where we formatted the book into tiny signatures, then stitched and bound it to put it on the shelf next to the rest of the Jesse Ball oeuvre. If anybody out there is looking to experiment with that sort of thing, this is a great length of novella to try it out!)

[Paolo Latini · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una novella per certi versi complementare allo splendido “How to Set and Fire,” che che sembra sviluppare un tema che lì era rimasto un po’ nascosto tra le altre trame: invecchiare significa perdere le persone care, e perdere le persone care significa perdere un po’ del senso che nell’arco della vita si è riusciti a dare alla vita stessa. Così accade che Ezra Wesely, scacchista professionista e maestro di scacchi, muore e lascia la sua vedova Loring in un mondo che da ricostruire: «For where he had been the largeness of her life, now his loss was; his loss was, and the worth of what he had been: those two things together became the core». Questa, scacchista e maestra di scacchi anche lei, a cinque anni dalla morte del marito, viene contatta dalla famiglia del piccolo Stan per delle lezioni di scacchi. Lentamente Loring inizia a vedere o a costruire nel ragazzino vezzi e gesti che appartenevano al marito defunto. Gli scacchi diventano un simbolo per la vita, che come gli scacchi non si giocano sulla scacchiera ma in testa, si vive più in testa, nell’immaginazione e analisi di quanto accade nella realtà che nella realtà quotidiana. E qui le lezioni di scacchi si intrecciano con discussioni sui sogni, sulla magia, la prestidigitazione, l’illusionismo in una complessa rete di simbolismi che forse avrebbero avuto bisogno dello spazio di un romanzo intero.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a magical book and by "magical" I don't mean sorcery or prestidigitation I mean the kind of magic you associate with something like Christmas, something wonderful and special and surprising.

The story is one we’ve seen before (Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 film, Birth, is the obvious example): a woman’s husband dies and she thinks she sees him in a new pupil she’s agreed to give chess lessons to. Both Loring and her late husband, Ezra, were chess masters:

They had both been famous masters, he and she, and both had played in major tournaments in their time. He had been a champion for a period of years. They were not forgotten, not even then, so long after, and would occasionally be visited by old friends, or young people, curious about their accomplishments.

One day Ezra complains about a slight cough and within a few weeks he dies, peacefully, in bed with his wife. She feels his loss, bitterly, but life goes on and her and her husband were the kind of people who got on with things:

Many worried that Loring would not be able to get along after Ezra’s death, but those fears proved groundless. Neighbours saw her each morning on the walks she had once taken by his side, and they saw at her evening, returning from the market. The signboard was still posted by the house, and she continued to take students, and to teach them well.

The only changes to her routine are daily visits to the local cemetery to visit her husband’s grave to, as she puts it, renew the freshness of her loss and, when she wants to talk to Ezra at other times she end up writing him letters…

…reams and reams of letters, buried in a box. She wrote him a hundred letters, two hundred letters, a letter a day, and buried them in the ground by his grave.

And this is how life muddles on until, after some five years, a mother knocks on her door with her five-year-old son, Stan, who, she says, is a prodigy: “He’s beaten them all,” she says, “his father, his uncle, a man in the town square.” Before saying yes or no Loring invites them in to see if what the mother says is true:

The first game the boy lost quickly. It was over as soon as it had begun. But the second—in the second, a very odd thing happened. He played an actual opening, and played it properly—and the opening was that that had been conceived by Loring’s husband, the Wesley-Fetz Counter Gambit. It was not much used. Ezra had used it, but few others.

As he looks up from the board for a few seconds Loring is sure she sees her husband looking back at her and so she agrees to take on the boy. Later she writes to Ezra:

I remain confused about what it would mean if the boy IS you. Would then the things about him that are unfamiliar to me be things that were true about you, but that changed over time, so that when you met me they had all vanished? In that sense, would I now be discovering the last of you—to find a whole that had always been lost to me?

Once a week the boy arrives but as time passes Loring finds herself spending more and more time trying to prove her hypothesis. With mostly mixed results. Until the sixth visit.

This is a book about loss, obviously, but it doesn’t tackle its subject in an obvious way; there’s more poetry here than you might expect. For example, her husband gives her a box which he says she shouldn’t open until three months after his death (he later amends this to a year) but over five years later the box is still sitting there on a table in a “room was [that was] for nothing at all, and never had been.”

There was something wrong with it, but they couldn’t say what. They would occasionally put things in there because they felt something would happen. The things that happened were never anything that one could really know about.

[…]

[I]t was almost like the room was in this house and in another house, and that was why it didn’t really work to put anything in it, unless you felt like the things in it would also be elsewhere.

There’s a lot of stuff like that in the book, ideas presented but just left dangling. It’s all a little odd. In fact the whole book feels like it exists with one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the real world. And I suppose that makes sense because after a great loss I’m sure for many the world they find themselves in no longer feels like the one they inhabited only a few short days before. It’s like Loring notes after her husband’s funeral:

[I]t seemed that suddenly everyone was gone away. It was a week later. It was month later. She found herself again and again there by the grave, and it was as though the funeral had just ended, and yet no one was there.

A strange and disquieting little book. The ending may disappoint but I’m not sure how any book about this kind of loss can end in a good and satisfying way. The book left me with an ache and I think that was intentional.

This is the second book of Jesse Ball’s I’ve tackled—I picked up The Curfew a couple of years back (a dystopian novel I described as “sweet”)—and I’d have no problem reading him again. He brings something different to the table and even if it doesn’t always work it keeps my interest.

[Salty Swift · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy gets more Kafkaesque with each book. If you want to know what nightmares await when a widow decides to take on a young boy and polish off his chess skills, this would be a great place to start....

[Travis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid novella from Ball, though I wish it broke into more of the surrealism that it just seemed to be dipping its toes into (mainly seemingly to call the sanity of the narrator into question) and also I feel like since it is such a straightforward story it could have existed as a short story. Still, I have become a fan of Ball's and need to read through more of his ouvre.

[Arja Salafranca · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Lesson is a strange read indeed. This novella is written lightly, in short bite-sized chapters that serve to move the story along quickly. Ostensibly this is a story about Loring, a chess master who loses her husband Ezra, also a chess master, to sickness, as the story opens. Five years later, Loring is still grieving her husband: “For where he had been the largeness of her life, now his loss was; his loss was, and the worth of what he had been: those two things together became the core.”

Yet she still but gives occasional lessons in the game. One day a woman knocks on the door with her young son, Stan, saying he’s a chess prodigy and he needs lessons. Loring agrees to take him on and so begins a strange relationship with the young boy. It’s clear he’s no prodigy to Loring, and there’s less playing of chess that goes on and more talk and conversation, strange as that may sound between the young child and the old woman. He awakens a curiosity in her, as he looks so much like the departed Ezra, and a desperation too. For while this is a story about a woman and a boy and the bond that can grow between them, this is also a mediation on chess and the games people play. And, on another level, it is also a tale about loss and grief, and how that pushes us beyond what we might normally believe.

A fabulist yet thought-provoking story.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a huge Jesse Ball fan (he's on my short list of author's whose new stuff I buy the day it comes out) but this title had a few things working against it. One, it was a Kindle Single, which meant it is only available as an eBook. I have not, nor do I ever intend to join the ebook revolution. I'm happy with my heavy old smelly print books thank you. So I was probably irritated I had to read this on my Kindle (though I will admit the highlight function is pretty nice). Secondly it was a bit on the short side and the ending hit me out of nowhere and not particularly in a good way. Still it's a Jesse Ball book so all the usual trademarks are there. The weird. The beautiful passages. The uncertainty. It's not The Curfew or The Way Through Doors but it will still provide you with a fix for your Jesse Ball withdrawal.

[Marcheto Marcheto · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
Loring is an old woman who thinks that his husband, a brilliant chess player who died five years before, is trying to communicate with her through her five years old new chess student. This sad and strange novella starts quite intriguing, but in my opinion it doesn’t fulfill the promise of the first third of the book, and although it’s a short book I found myself losing some interest halfway through it. I particularly didn’t see the point of some slightly weird details that didn’t contribute anything to the plot and that left me slightly puzzled.
Nevertheless, as it’s a light and short read I’m not sorry I gave it a chance, even if I just liked it and not loved it.

[Elizabeth Gambeski · Rating 3 out of 5]

i am always eager to read Jesse's new work! this one really tested my mind even more than I expected! he really stretched the boundaries of time and its effect on emotion. most of the time I didn't know what to think, but as usual i was still drawn on to the next page. I missed having a book to hold, but the construction of the word was still just as beautiful!

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Vintage Short that’s not all that short

This Lesson from Mr. Ball is a somewhat fantastical story about a reincarnation. It’s pretty strong as an idea for a story, but the plot feels disjointed. The Lesson is at least novella length, although “short novel” might be a better description.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange little book. Loring and Ezra, elderly, married chess masters. Ezra dies. Five years later Loring begins teaching chess to a five year old boy. Is the boy Ezra reincarnated? The book is written in a style reminiscent of old tales. A book about love and growing old.

[Fahad Baseer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical, illustrative, absurd,surreal. I can't believe the digital version is selling for only 99 cents. This is by all means a 100 dollar read. I use this word very rarely... Jesse Ball is a genius.

[Patrick Cottrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this strange little book. dark, peculiar, sad.

[Esther Chaya · Rating 2 out of 5]

i liked it, sort of...
weird concept, but the narrator's voice was excellent

[Caleb L · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent Short Novel

Read anything and everything you can get your hands on by Jesse Ball. This short is strange and terrible and wonderful.