The Way Through Doors

by Jesse Ball

With his debut novel, Samedi the Deafness , Jesse Ball emerged as one of our most extraordinary new writers. Now, Ball returns with this haunting tale of love and storytelling, hope and identity.

When Selah Morse sees a young woman get hit by a speeding taxicab, he rushes her to the hospital. The girl has lost her memory; she is delirious and has no identification, so Selah poses as her boyfriend. She is released into his care, but the doctor charges him to keep her awake, and to help her remember her past. Through the long night, he tells her stories, inventing and inventing, trying to get closer to what might be true, and hoping she will recognize herself in one of his tales. Offering up moments of pure insight and unexpected, exuberant humor, The Way Through Doors demonstrates Jesse Ball's great artistry and gift for and narrative.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Novels, Literary Fiction, Magical Realism, Surreal, Contemporary

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

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

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

My unreviewed books are amassing around my bed. They aren't allowed to return to a shelf until they have been written about. In order to destroy a small amount of the expansive clutter in my tiny apartment I'll finally start reviewing some of them. I'm not planning on this being an epic review or even very good one.

The Way Through Doors is a wonderful book. Jesse Ball executes the structure of this book perfectly. The book is about a man who works as a government inspector in a vague agency in a city like New York, but if it had been built by the urban planners responsible for Kafka's Prague. The man sees a woman get hit by a car and takes her to the hospital. She has no identification and at the spur of the moment the man tells the hospital that she is his girlfriend and when she leaves the hospital he takes her to his apartment to care for her. In order to possibly help her remember her identity, or maybe it is to building a new identity that the lonely man is a part of, he starts to tell her a story, the kind that he tells her she liked to hear.

The story he tells her contains other stories that also contain other stories some of which fold-back narratively on one another. By a quick perusal of other reviews and the blurbs on the book it's clear that Calvino comes to mind by this structure. But that is a cheap comparison. If On a Winters Night is a series of nested stories all bound together by the same opening line, and creates a Russian Doll of stories within stories, but as much as I like Calvino's book, the Italian master never achieves the fluidity that Ball does here. Part of this is due to the structure of the two books, Calvino starts a new chapter for each new story, Ball has no chapters and no page numbers either, rather the reader is given the number of paragraphs in the book in the margin. I normally don't like it when my page numbers are taken away, but here it gave the book the feeling of reading a book that has long been standardized with authoritative page numberings, you know like when you read Aristotle or Plato and pages are numbered to line up to the same line in any edition of the author you'd be reading (that took the care to include these numbers). Plato and Aristotle are numbered by the pages from what is considered the Canonical version of the work, Ball just numbers every five paragraphs.

So much for page numbers. Back to what I was writing about. Calvino's stories have a jerky quality to how they start and stop, maybe that is by the physical structure of the words on the page, but it also feels more forced than it does in Ball.

Ball though moves seamlessly between stories. Characters in a story will start a new story, but in a natural way that moves in and out of the story being told, as if you were listening to someone who tells a good story in person but is still responding to the world around them until the storyteller takes an unnoticed step back and the new story moves to the forefront, as if it were happening and not merely something one person recounts to another person. But, it's not like this is the only way the stories weave in and out from one another. Ball keeps way he creates the tapestry of the narrative interesting, so that even though I knew that the book was stories within stories it was still unexpected when I'd find myself totally immersed in a new story and pleasantly surprised when a story would connect to an earlier story.

I've seen people refer to the structure of this book as like the nested Russian Dolls. That is an incorrect description though. A closer description would be a Mobius Strip, or maybe a couple of interconnected strips that allow for the flow to be interrupted and reconnected at different places in the book. The Russian Doll analogy is too hierarchical for the way the stories in this book connect with one another.

So besides structure, this book is very very readable. It's whimsical in the best of ways and without the negative sides of being too breezy, sort of in the same way that Trip to the Stars is a whimsical novel.

That's all I've got for this one.

[Rory · Rating 2 out of 5]

Um, nah. Maybe if I was 22. And had a crush on the admittedly adorably tousled writer based solely on his jacket photo. And didn't mind that the narrative was chopped into hundreds of poetic/repetitive/evocative/maddening pieces. But I'm not, and I don't, and I did.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

She had been struck by a car which came from nowhere and gone away afterwards to nowhere. She had been taken to hospital by a young man who she had never met. There she had been taken to a hospital by a young man whom she had never met. There she had been taken care of well and it had been found that her memory was lost, perhaps for food, and she had left that place in the company of the young man who found her. Together that had gone back to the young man’s rooms, where his printing press and lithograph machine and all the tools of his trade were arrayed all about the spaces and belongings that made up his life. Amidst all this he … began to speak to her in a layered, tortuous fashion, keeping always her past and the things that night have been foremost in his mind. He arrayed before her all the objects of his hope and the things he wished had been and were, and so they became what was real, and not imagined, and he placed his life in the context of hers, and together they drifted, questing, through the half-light, his resourcefulness all that stood between themselves and the devil, sleep.

The plot above summarises the central conceit of the story – a kind of equally fantastical re-working of the tale of Scheherazade (via Calvino, Borges, Kafka and Bernard), where the central protagonist Selah Morse (a pamphleteer whose in-progress masterwork is on the, future, 1978 World Fair, now working as a Municipal Inspector) spends a night telling stories to a girl to stop her falling asleep (and potentially into a coma). The stories draw on Selah’s own situation, his fantasies about the girl’s background, his pamphlet and much more. The stories contain layers of embedded stories – he describes meeting someone who tells a story, which then involves someone else telling a story and so on. However it would be incorrect to consider the stories as nested; in practice they are intertwined, with protagonists from one “level” suddenly appearing in another level or retelling a story from a third level. And although I have (like many other reviewers I am sure) drawn up Borges and Calvino for a comparison, the book is very different – their formality and structure being almost entirely absent.

Ball’s Wiki page claims that his creative writing classes at Chicago are on the subjects of “lying, ambiguity, dreaming and walking” - if so then this should be a set book for the courses. Ball’s own website describes him as an “absurdist and fabulist”, and that style is to the fore here.

I know that with his more recent books, Ball has been disappointed that what he sees as “extended social critique of the moral choices that have been made by the Western World” have been viewed, by English language readers, as simply experimental fiction. In this case though I think it is hard to see the book as anything more than experimental and really an exploration of storytelling, ambiguity, fantasy, recursion rather than any form of social critique. Not just the stories but even the individual sentences too often feel like they have been put together via some form of random process (hence my opening paragraph) which either shows an absence of any form of underlying moral/critique or obfuscates whatever is meant to be there.

I am sure many of us have played (or perhaps still play) the “once upon a time” party game where you sit in a circle and take turns to tell a story, one word (or phrase or sentence) at a time. Or the near equivalent (sometimes structured as Consequences) involving concertinaed pieces of paper where each person writes a sentence, folds the page to hide it and passes it to the next person to add blind the next stage of then what literally ends up being told as an unfolding story.

This book really is perhaps better described as Jesse Ball turning both games into an art form, albeit with himself as the sole player. This is evident both in the meta-structure (with the stories themselves feeling like different players around the circle taking on the telling) and in the micro-writing, how else, other than the output of a self-administered game of Consequences, for example can you explain sentences like:

[he] wore the simple attire of the story of person who researches sin in the depths of the Vatican but is not a priest at all and goes often flower picking in the country by himself, never speaking to anyone he sees there.

Or completely random phrases like this one is an otherwise banal interaction

That book is pretty swell. It into my face present with bold pretense.

Although sometimes the random assimilation does seem to work, for example I liked both sentences in:

Lincoln gestured that the many strange and impetuous avatars and incarnations that accompanied him in the form of bespectacled clerks should be off for a moment about some putative business. They left Lincoln and Lefferts in a pronounced globe of quiet.

And overall the net effect remains entertaining due to Ball’s imagination and storytelling skills and command of language, although at one point one of the protagonists points out that a lengthy discourse is of no relevance to the question he was asking and this was probably the only point of identification I felt with the characters.

His voice was thick and strange, as is anyone’s who has just told a long and involved tale, only to learn the person listening was not really listening.

This is Ball’s his debut novel (but one which, unsurprisingly given its rough edges, was not published until after he had gained a reputation with his first published novel - Samedi the Deafness”.

Overall an interesting read - but more as an insight into an author’s formative years.

Who can say therefore where a certain person is, for what is it that anchors a person? Is it their place in the story to which you are a part? Many stories hereabouts run side to side, and you cannot be at pains to unpin them, for they are sharp, and you will only sting the tips of your fingers.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like vague things said the man. The vaguer the better.

My 6th Jesse Ball novel - and another wonderful edition to a body of work from an author who I think I can now happily say is my favourite living Anglophone writer. Although The Way Through Doors was actually the first novel Ball wrote, and the second that was published (2009, after Samedi, the Deafness in 2007), both part of what he describes(https://www.powells.com/post/intervie...) as:

the first phase [2003-10]: there’s March Book, A Picnic in Ten Years' Time, Amok Book, and Parables and Lies, The Way Through Doors, and the early novellas, Pieter Emily and The Early Deaths of L, B, H, C, everything up until The Curfew. And then one that hasn't been released yet called Plainface, although part of it was published in the Paris Review many years ago. And also The Lesson. The Lesson is probably the last of that phase, I think. This was like a lyrical phase, where all of these works have the intensity of lyrical expression above anything else.

Then I think the second phase [2011-present] begins with Silence Once Begun. And those works are much plainer, except for the second section of Silence, the Jito Joo section. That's where all of that energy is isolated. But that's a fairly short section. From that point on, I would say the books are much less lyrical in general, leading up to [The Census].

And it's not just lyricism. In a lot of those early books, something being strange was sufficient in and of itself for me. I was charmed by strange things, coincidences, and the natural revelatory content of coincidence. As time goes on, the books become more pointed than that.

This novel starts with the first person narration of Selah Morse, a keen pamphleteer, his planned masterpiece a treatise on the World's Fair, 7 June 1978, whose powerful uncle decides needs a proper job so sends him to the mysterious building.

On a desk a girl lay sleeping. She was quite slender, and expensively dressed. She gave one the impression of a cat, insomuch as were one to wake her it seemed she would only stalk off to some other place, there to resume her slumber.

I looked at Levkin. He had his finger over his lips. Softly, he said:

- That's Rita, the message girl
- Messages for what? I whispered.
- The Seventh Ministry. Muncipal Inspection.

Selah has been appointed as a second Muncipal Inspector (to the displeasure of the first), a role that seems essentially undefined, but powerful, the inspectors allowed to inspect whatever they wish and require the authorities to act on the findings (at one point he decides to borrow a friend's dog to inspect all the city parks in terms of their canine friendliness), a deliberate element of randomness in an otherwise too ordered world.

Rita herself is a rather quirky and flirtatious character (one criticism of the novel might be that Ball overdoes that trope a little), refusing to take verbal messages: Only written messages. What sort of message girl do you think I am, and needing to be coaxed into bringing a cup of tea, although when she does it is Irish breakfast. With just the right amount of milk and sugar. (which incidentally, in my firm view, is clearly none in both cases)

This of itself would make a fascinating novel - and in some senses this reminded me rather of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where Douglas Adams's throwaway lines would have constituted the basis for an entire book for lesser writers.

But all this takes place by paragraph* 85 of 1905, and the main story arises when, while heading to a noodle shop, Selah witnesses a girl being knocked down in a traffic accident. Accompanying her to hospital he is first mistaken for her partner but then, when it proves she has lost her memory, he assumes the role, and tells her stories to help her recover her identity:

He began to speak to her in a layered, tortuous fashion, keeping always her past, and the things that might have been, foremost in his mind. He arrayed before her all the objects of his hope, all the things he wished had been and were, and so then they became what was real, and not imagined, and he placed his life in the context of hers, and together they drifted, questing, through the half-light, his resourcefulness all that stood between themselves and the devil, sleep.

And this is how the remaining 1820 paragraphs proceed. Selah's first story is to retell his story from the opening pages of the novel, almost verbatim, but with small differences. In this version, the sleeping Rita is still described as cat-like but now because it seemed she would be likely to scratch you or bite you with great animosity, she is similarly offended by being asked to take a verbal message but now concedes that phone messages may also be accepted, and when she brings him some tea it is now Earl Grey (mixed with a slow-acting poison, I had decided to poison you and give you the anecdote every day to make you obey me she admits) rather than Irish Breakfast.

* I refer to paragraph 85/1905 as the paragraphs, in increments of 5, rather than the pages. As Ball has explained in an interview:

The physical arrangement of the words is very important to me! It doesn't have page numbers simply because pages were not one of the constructive architectures. As storytelling is the heart of the matter, so the inception of speech, the paragraph, is the numbered unit.

This Selah heads for a Chinese restaurant, rather than a noodle shop, before going to the big public library to annotate the permanent copies of the encylopedia with my own insightful commentary in neat red pen, and there the restaurateur tells him the story (almost a fairy tale, but one with an odd twist) of "the curling touch", and in that story someone tells another story and so on.

The mathematician in me was originally hoping that the layers of stories - A telling about B telling about C etc - would be smoothly unravelled at the end of the novel, with A telling how B told how C told etc about finishing their tale. But actually that wouldn't be true to Ball's credo here, as the stories aren't so much layered as tangled, and ambiguity rather than consensus is the key to his credo (a link with a key theme of Silence, Once Begun that began his 2nd phase of writing). From this novel:

Who can say therefore where a certain person is, for what is it that anchors a person? Is it their place in the story to which you are a part? Many stories here about run side-by-side, and you cannot be at pains to unpin them, for they are sharp, and you will only sting the tips of your fingers.

And from another interview (http://portersquarebooksblog.blogspot...)

The main issue, as I see it, isn't between linear and non-linear narrative. It's between two types of rendering: rendering a reality that is already the consensus, or rendering one that is more precise, more clear and more real because it is ambiguous.

As the novel progresses the stories begun more and more tangled, Selah himself (or a version of him) and the injured girl (or a possible version of her) both end up in the world of the curling touch for example.

Highly recommended. 4.5 stars - I hesitate to give 5 only as, with more Ball novels left to read, I might find myself stranded, as, ignoring the wise example of Spinal Tap, Goodreads ratings don't go to 6.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely book, but a bit preoccupied with it's own loveliness - quite often Ball's unique descriptive touch will delight readers; by the end of the novel I must admit to a bit of impatience with his incessant vagueness, both in plot and in descriptive detail.

The framing device of the novel (a man telling stories to a woman who has lost her memories) is pretty much dropped right away; stories bleed into stories bleed into other stories without explanation or warning. Ball's dialogue starts off feeling pregnant with meaning and riddle and mystery, but after a time it becomes clear that a good portion of what his characters say is only window-dressing; most of the time the author is setting the mood, not imparting information to readers.

I recommend it - especially if you find you're the type of person who can 'just go with it'. If you have to know why people are saying certain things, or how one scene logically connects to another you'll likely find it frustrating, but Ball's artistic touch is pretty well beyond reproach - he lays it on a bit thick at times, but I certainly look forward to reading Samedi the Deafness.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Way Through Doors is the second novel published by Jesse Ball, after Samedi The Deafness. According to the website jesseball.com, it was, however, the first novel he wrote. I assume the positive reception for Samedi meant that it was deemed worthwhile to go back and publish his earlier work.

Both these two novels have the same feel of planned spontaneity. As you read them, it is hard to believe that Ball is doing anything other than making it all up as he goes along. But, at the same time, there is a clear trajectory (plot is almost certainly the wrong word) being followed.

In The Way Through Doors, Selah Morse lands a job as a municipal inspector and witnesses an accident in which a taxi hits a young woman (at this point, I began to think about my top book of 2019, Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything which also plays with reality after someone is hit by a car). Selah takes the woman to hospital, fabricates a name, Mora Klein, for her and identifies himself as her boyfriend. All this when he has never actually seen her before (as far as we know). This means that Mora is then released into his care on the proviso that he keeps her awake because of the concussion she has suffered.

That’s the set up. The fun really starts when Selah decides to keep Mora awake by telling her a story. He begins with a modified version of his rise to municipal inspector (if you are like me, you will find yourself flicking between the two versions of the story looking for the changes, because the text is repeated in modified fashion). From this point, the stories spiral out of control, although they clearly aren’t actually out of control. One story nests within another down to several different layers (think of the movie Inception at this point), but characters reappear at new story levels without warning. Identity is a key theme as the story progresses.

You would be mad to claim that it isn’t confusing. But the confusion is the delight of the book. Along with the plethora of idiosyncratic characters. Along with the excellent writing (Ball has a background in poetry and you can see this both in his choice of words and his choices of what not to say).

This is my fourth Ball novel. I started with Census and the subsequent The Divers’ Game and these two led me to want to read everything starting from the beginning. These first two are incredibly inventive. Perhaps you could accuse this one of being a bit too clever for its own good, but I have to acknowledge that I had a smile on my face for a lot of the time I was reading this, not because it is funny so much as because it is a pleasure to read.

[Meike]

Haaaach, Jesse Ball...you can never read enough Jesse Ball.....

[Ill Literati Crazy People In Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kafka plus Calvino.

Again, one of the best books I've read since I was born.

Words that describe the experience of reading The Way Through Doors by Jesse Ball: fanciful, enlivening, refreshing, strange (with a positive connotation), dreamlike, wise, playful, eternal ...

To be honest, when I started reading this book I thought, "Pretentious ..." but was very pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be a lovely, delightful ride through a reality I might never have imagined.

Places transform, stories blend into other stories entirely only to be wound back again. This book is why I love fiction: Jesse Ball pushes the limits of the genre and delights the reader with epiphanies that seem to come out of thin air.

This book is a wonderous meditation on the journey rather than the destination.

Yum!

[Renee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Quite possibly the most annoying book ever. I usually like stories within a story, but Ball adds so many in without ever finishing one. All the tales are interesting, and nicely written but then they just stop abruptly. Couldn't this guy just write a collection of short stories? By the time he got back to the main characters I just wanted the book to be over- the ending made no sense and was completely unsatisfying. I don't recommend this book, and wouldn't waste my time with anything from this author.

[Nichole (DirrtyH) · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you take the movie "The Brothers Bloom" and stir it together with the book "House of Leaves", then stick it in a blender with a set of deformed Russian nesting dolls, then put it under your pillow and dream it, you might come up with an approximation of this book.

And that's the best I can do to explain it. :) This is a series of stories within stories within stories, all of which feel very much like a dream because they follow no real sense of logic. But it's fun and it's whimsical and it's engaging, and there are so many lines that made me laugh out loud. This book was totally worth reading. Too bad I had a library copy and couldn't fold pages or highlight paragraphs or I'd include some quotes in this review.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

I visited an independent book store in the summer, and stumbled upon their web site a couple of days later. They had set up for employees to post their recommendations and was really taken by the write up for this book. Here is the description that caught my eye from Publishers Weekly via Amazon.Com:

When pamphleteer Selah Morse witnesses a taxi run down a young woman, he takes her to the hospital and, in telling the staff that he is her boyfriend and that her name is Mora Klein, is given custody of her. She is amnesiac, and his orders are to reconstruct her memories through story. The book then begins anew, and the narrative folds in upon itself again and again, launching in new directions and each time leaving the earlier story incomplete. Throughout, Morse searches out Mora Klein's identity, picking up other travelers along the way, among them a Coney Island mind reader; a doting husband who may or may not have made a deal with the devil; a love interest for Morse fascinated by the pamphleteer's opus; and a fiddle-playing dog.

I didn't read this too thoroughly, because I missed the bit about "... leaving the earlier story incomplete." This didn't bother me too much, but it was a light into the mind of this book. As was "... the narrative folds in upon itself again and again ..." These made for a frustrating read.

Now that's not to say the book was bad. Two big keys to the authors talent: he can write, meaning great prose, and he can tell a story. Quite fantastical at times, it was very pleasing to read. However, like the description states, at times things were left hanging and the scene would melt back into the previous characters. Not only did it leave me wanting to go back and find out what happened with the previous story lines, but it left me scratching me head on why the switch. One reviewer compared the stories to a Möbius strip. Good call.

One other thing that made this book a little unfriendly to me was how it was divided up. These days most books have many breaking points. This book, clocking in at around 230 pages (it didn't have page numbers), only had four sections. Because things melted into each other so thoroughly, it was hard to find a spot to put the book down, though this could be seen as a good thing, too. But with my reading time being chopped up into smaller chunks, it made reading the book tough at times.

Getting back to Ball's prose, I was delighted to read it. He has written some poetry, and I always worry that writers will bring too much into their fiction. Not here. He created a very pleasing text to read, was concise in his descriptions, didn't linger too long, and let things melt in the readers mind quite nicely. But like I already mentioned, he also melted a lot of the stories together which led to some confusion.

A fairly interesting book that I am still trying to figure out how I feel about it. Even after writing this "review".

[Lily Spengler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Folks I have finished my reading goal! And with that comes the last book I will ever add to my college shelf. This feeling is powerfully bittersweet.

This has been quite a year for Jesse Ball and me. The University of Michigan Library has a pretty substantial collection of his books (this is where I first discovered How to Set a Fire and Why, naturally) and I think of him as a pretty niche author, so I was trying to take advantage and knock as many off my list as I could before graduation. I spontaneously added like five of his books after reading How to Set a Fire and Why, which is in every way Ball’s outlier. Allora, c’è la vita.

To try to describe it, his writing combines the narrative absurdity of Kurt Vonnegut with the cold detachment of Haruki Murakami (also in his own way absurd, I suppose). I’ve long since given up trying to really follow what goes on as his stories unfold. I’ve learned that it’s better to just allow yourself to be swept up in his tide. Scenes slip suddenly into completely different settings and sets of happenstance, so eventually it develops a very dreamlike quality. This book wasn’t organized by chapters or even page numbers so I assume the disorientation was willful on the part of the author. He even put in little hand-done drawings every so often, just like Vonnegut does. I don’t know why some authors are allowed to do that and others aren’t.

Cheers to number 52!!

[Marie-Therese · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Playful and inventive, filled with charming miniature stories of great beauty, the whole of this little book somehow doesn't quite add up to the sum of its individual parts. Gumble's Yard's excellent review below gives a fine accounting of why that is. I recommend reading it if you want to know more about this book before taking it on.

[Les · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!”

“First, he says, you have to go out into the world. This is not a simple matter of going outside one's door. No, that is simply going out. That's what one does when one is on the way to the store to buy a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a bottle of wine. When one goes out into the world, one is shedding preconceptions of past paths and ideas of past paths, and trying to move freely through an unsubstantiated and new geography.”
---


The problem with reading a lot is that you should then review at least as much. (Reviewing for a greater number of books than you have actually read or for books you have not read is not the best idea. (I have accidentally reviewed a book (wrong book--same author as intended) due to being up far too late and lacking sleep and coherency because of staying up that late.) http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...) I have been on a wonderful reading jag recently and my reviews have not kept up with my reading pace.

I intend to review The Way Through Doors soon, but am not going to right now. Still, I need you to know that I loved this book, devoured it, and have quickly become a superfan of Jesse Ball's writing.

He apparently writes like a crazy crossbreed of Borges, Calvino, and Kafka (how is that for one wild and crazy labyrinthal and literary law firm?!). I have to shame-facedly admit that I have read neither Borges or Calvino yet and thus far have only read Kafka's number 1 hit about that buggy Gregor fellow. I know I need to rectify that situation. Anyway, those who know these things comment that Jesse Ball writes like these masters. Many have marked similarities between The Way Through Doors and Calvino's If On A Winter's Night a Traveler. A few, brave souls, have argued that Ball's work is actually more fluid. I will be happy to give you my opinion on that matter once I have actually read Calvino. Such name-dropping at least serves to give you the basic style in which Ball writes. His writing is poetic and his plots fantastical while rooted in a normal modern existence. His style engrosses you to the point where sometimes you don't care whether or not the plot actually works (this is especially true with Samedi: The Deafness), but I think it works beautifully in this case.

I would love for my friends who read some of the crazier wordsmiths and writers who send readers down rabbit holes to read Ball. I am curious to know if he is a lightweight compared to that camp. I intend to seek these answers myself, but am still interested in how Mr. Ball is received.

If you want a real review, try these:

2 excellent ones:

Greg's: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Natalie's: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

and a review from the woman who should be Jesse Ball's official reviewer . . .

Leslie's: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

Act now and you can receive a link to The Official Ball Reviewer's review of Samedi the Deafness:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

[Conor Bateman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surreal and beautiful, Jesse Ball's The Way Through Doors isn't merely a set of stories-within-stories or an ode to storytelling but rather a unique dreamscape of ideas patched together with the loose assemblage of narrative structure and adventure.

Following Selah Morse, known as S., the pamphleteer or the young municipal inspector, on a journey of ever evolving narrative elements that acts as both an attempt to keep awake a concussed amnesiac and also a self-induced bout of inspiration and creativity designed to propel him forward to the completion of a long dormant pamphlet of ideas.

It's much too easy to dismiss the novel as indulgent and unecessary in terms of its ultimate meaning or function, particularly if you focus on understanding the text as cohesive whole rather than willingly and eagerly letting whichever narrator it may be lead you down a rabbithole of plot propulsion. I, for one, was enrapt in the book, a rare instance where during the reading of a novel your perception of things around you changes, so caught up in the internal logic of the fictive work in front of you.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. I don't even know how to describe it. It is a series of stories set inside stories, like a Matryoshka doll or the layers of an onion. There are no seams between the stories - one flows into the next, and the protagonist's quest creates not a plot but a sense forward motion. Each section of the novel, before any climax can be reached, branches off into another new "plot," but these nested stories continue telling the story of the original set of characters, giving the impression of weaving more than writing, where a single thread reappears in the fabric unexpectedly, far from the last place one noticed it. The Way Through Doors is a novel of pure feeling and pure thought that, through the deftness of the author, manages to be engaging at the same time.

I loved Jesse Ball's last book, Samedi the Deafness, bit this is his masterwork, and it will certainly become one of the books against which I judge contemporary literature. I would put it in my top ten favorite books, maybe higher.

[Nissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Ball's first book "Samedi the Deafness" after getting it in my mailbox at work by accident (I work at a news organization and often get pitched books). I read it in one weekend and found it compelling but ultimately pretty forgettable. "The Way Through Doors" takes all of the crazy, winding elements that kept me reading "Samedi" and jumps headlong down the rabbit hole. It definitely takes some patience to read -- unlike many other story within a story tales (Arabian Nights, Princess Bride) the narrator never leaves the fantasy world for a breath of reality. I almost forgot what the book was about half way through, and had to read the back cover to be reminded of the plot line. But really what I think Ball has written is a poem, rather than a novel. It's a beautiful and wondrous poem, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has a free weekend and an open mind to digest it.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here are some (not even all) of the influences I picked up (an admittedly subjective process) while reading this book:

- Italo Calvino, first and foremost
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Lewis Carroll (characters speaking nonsense, appearing to be angry for no reason)
- David Lynch (highly slipstream)
- Paul Auster (the beginning, especially)
- Salvador Plascencia
- Kafka

That having been said, I would recommend skipping this and consulting these other artists instead. The Way Through Doors is like a foam created from mixing them all together. It's a frothy, well-dressed book which, for me, did not rise above these influences. Books like Labyrinths, or If On A Winter's Night a Traveler, may look similar on the surface, but there is such a conceptual depth to Borges, which is aided and embodied by the clever packaging. The Way Through Doors flowed pleasantly by, like a pretty, busy river, and didn't leave much of a mark in my mind.

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Critics described The Way Through Doors as experimental fiction at its very finest. Loath to pigeonhole the novel, some nonetheless compared aspects of it to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Paul Auster's New York trilogy, and novels by Franz Kafka and Kazuo Ishiguro. Certainly, the work is disorienting as it plays with time, geography, and character -- from a Russian empress to princes to bureaucrats to a "guest artist" who reads minds. At times, the novel is perhaps too whimsical for mainstream tastes. But that reviewers were not bothered that they couldn't summarize the plot (and that they did not criticize the author's self-conscious construct) testifies to this novel's power. "Ball is a talented new writer whom we ought to watch," concludes the San Francisco Chronicle. "There is no other explanation."

This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Stacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still wish I could/would have read the entire thing in one sitting (as I think the story rather lends itself to being read that way) rather than in choppy starts & stops that life has tossed me lately.

The Way Through Doors is a charming, circuitous, surrealist fairy tale for grown-ups. This is experimental, meandering fiction that reads, in places, almost like poetry; stories fold into new stories, upon old stories, back to variations of previous stories, cycling characters & places through modifications or kaleidoscopic views, casting different, yet similar, beautiful patterns throughout. Paragraph, but not page, numbering lends yet another atypical arrangement to this alternative tale.

Probably not for lovers of linear fiction, but it's a lovely, leisurely, dreamy traipse through a slightly surreal landscape. Clever characters, quixotic quests, dreamlike destinations, winsome writing. Consider me a delightfully charmed reader.

[Nicola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sorely disappointed by this. Loved "Samedi the Deafness." But though the structure of "The Way Through Doors" was interesting with story within story within story, ad infinitum, and the writing was strong and poetic, I don't think Ball pulled this book off. It was too much candy; every page there's something "fun" happening without any edge. There was no real threat in the book to sustain it--only the quirky and the, ultimately, saccharine. Though it's an interesting failure, I hope Ball leaves the warm, fuzzy side and gets back to the dark side where literature that provokes is. I'm not saying that all lit. needs to be dark and gloomy, but it should earn its happiness and not rely on the quirky all the time, i.e. every paragraph.

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's very original and groundbreaking. What a challenge! Did I enjoy reading it? Not entirely. In general, it was more work than fun. You'll have to be very patient. Maybe you'll hate it, maybe love it. I was in between...

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved Samedi the Deafness and Census even more, but this was just too much work. Stories within stories about story telling, about different versions of the same person, blergh. It was just a bloody gimmick. Interesting but no fun at all.

[Kirstie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This really deserves a high four stars and a part of me was tempted to give it five. It is wildly creative with a preposterous sort of energy that recalled a post-modern version of Italo Calvino's If On a Winter Night a Traveler. This is the first of Jesse Ball's books I've read but I felt like I was skipping through time, galavanting through characters, memories, stanzas, and thoughts. This is one imaginative far reaching tangential adventure. I'm pretty sure this novel will be one of those I come back to many times in my life and, because it is short enough to read in a day, it will be great for a pick me up when I'm looking for reassurance that modern literature is truly worthwhile.

I could write quite a bit about the book but I think my favorite quotes will give an even better idea and it will likely take me a great deal of time to type them all out.

Pages are not marked in typical format but lines are numbered in a somewhat random way.

Between 85-90 "With a dreadful thud, the braking taxi smashed full into the girl, sending her flying up into the air to land flat on the pavement some twenty feet away. The whole thing was rather like a geometry problem."


120-125 "Her voice was very fitting. It sounded like the comforting noises that faraway things make in morning."


280-285 "Slowly, I began to understand what was expected of me. We were a randomizing element in the psychology of the city. We were the practical element of the philosophy that all parts in a system should not react the same way."


625-630 "...when you are a child, somewhere between two and four years of age, a night comes that you have a dream. In that dream you dream your entire life, from start to finish, with all its happinesses, its disappointments, its loves, its hates, its pains, its joys. Your entire life. The dream should have to last an equivalent amount of time, but somehow it happens in just one night...Most people forget their dream. In fact, everyone forgets most of it. However, I was a very precocious child. That morning I was left alone by myself with a large sheet of paper and a bucket of crayons. While my dream was still fresh in my head, I constructed a map of my life, using symbols and writing down what I could. Somehow I realized that to write too much would ruin it, and would make me sad in the end. Therefore, what I wrote down were mostly clues as to how to manage the difficult parts."


840-845 "You're thinking, said the guess artist, that this whole business of there being only seven days to the week is a big lie, and tat there are actually eight, but that one is hidden, and that if you can discover it, your life is lengthened by that exact proportion, but better even that that, you bet one day a week when only the people in the know are out and about, and it is on that day that all the best conversations happen."


850-855 "One more thing, said Sif. You don't get the canary until you tell me what he's thinking. And don't lie, because I can tell when people are lying...He looked intently at the canary. Then he reached out and rattled the cage a little. The canary leapt from one spot in the cage to another. The guess artist began to cry...I refuse to tell you what he's thinking. It's too sad. Nothing so sad has ever been said out loud."

975-980 "...how could a person wander into a novel? It must be a dream. Then realizing that I was in a dream, all became possible."


1290-1295 "By this she meant in her heart that all the useless things one remembers well just before waking and forgets just after were in fact very important and perhaps all that stood now between herself and oblivion."


1310-1315 "It seems we must go downstairs in order to go upstairs, he said. In fact, I drew a staircase and pushed so hard with the crayon that the paper is broken. It doesn't say anything about a malachite door."


...

"What I like best, said the guess artist, is when at Coney Island on the boardwalk at the farthest distances of the sea come up very close and quietly to the edge of the sand to surprise me. HELLO, they say, and I greet them with a small shyness of smiling and inclining of my hand. Also, then the slanting of the light in deference to the occasion and the sudden and impulsive gladness of the bathers. Naturally, they are insensible to the reason for this business of the waves and myself and the sunlight. However, the effect always supersedes rationale, and they themselves, basking in the junction of the various elements, grow large in the world's esteem and are therefore suffused with the pleasure that is at the core of the sweetest and most delectable fruit."


1405-1410 "Such a wide ad never-ending stair, said the guess artist, is in danger of ceasing to be a stair to become instead a metaphor of some kind or even an allegory."


1580-1585 "For the total knowledge , the knowledge of all that may be in the world, is the knowledge of one's death and the world's continuing. That knowledge does not give. It takes away, removing from one peace of mind and fealty of thought. No, the greatest gift is in partiality And so, from these trees we gain the power to speak lies, to say things that are not true and place them delicately into the minds of those we would conquer."


1620-1625 "If you don't think of me at least once each day, then I will disappear entirely and no one will ever see me again."


1635-1640 "Mora Klein was one of the true phenomena of twentieth-century art. Born in obscurity in North Face, in Barrow, Alaska, in the 1970s, she made her first mark at the age of four, when it was discovered that she could draw a straight line. As it was the first documented case of a human having the ability to draw a straight line, she gained instant fame."


1750-1755 "I wonder what would happen, he thought, if a child stared at Darger artwork the entire time he was growing up. Would he be able to do a strange mathematics that no one had ever conceived? Or would he just become very good at helping little girls who were engaged in child-slave rebellions?


1810-1815 "We laughed when we were told that we would one day lose our skin and become piles of bones that had no laughter in them. And we knew too this was a lie, for once a thing has happened once, it cannot be stopped from happening again and again. Events are continuous, not broken, and they never move on. Stories tell themselves one to another, over and over, never ceasing, and we skip here and there, saying this is consciousness, this acrobatic feat, but what of remaining?"

[Susie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are stories nested within stories and I was swept away at times with following the narrative, wherever it went. But my practical and logical brain would step in from time to time and not remembering who the characters were (or why I should care about them, rather than just what happens) added a temperance to my wholehearted immersion. (I probably mixed up a few metaphors and idioms there - that's how this book rattles the mind.) So I liked it, but could not love it...

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. The Way Through Doors on the surface is about a young man, who has the brilliantly abstract job of municipal inspector (Selah Morse), who witnesses a beautiful girl (Mora Klein) getting hit by a taxi. He rushes her to the hospital where he tell the receiving nurse that he is the girl's boyfriend so that he can stay and make sure that she is all right. The doctor tells him that she is going to be fine but that her amnesia, due to landing on her head, means that she won't remember who she is and that he should keep her awake for the next 18 hours.

In reality, The Way Through Doors, is a story about stories. Jesse Ball does a brilliant job of crafting interesting stories. The stories flow easily and beautifully out of one and into another. Often the transition is so smooth that it can go completely unnoticed. Sometimes when one character starts telling a story, he is merely telling a story, and other times that story becomes the new focus. New stories refer to and complete old stories, characters in later stories discuss the meaning or interpretation of earlier stories. The interconnecting thread through all of these stories is Selah, often accompanied by his friend, the guess artist. Selah is traveling through many tales to find the lost Mora Klein. Through out his travels there are riddles to be solved and interesting characters who have their own stories. Through out all of these interesting stories, Jesse Ball, uses some of the most beautiful and original language. His descriptions are brilliant: "She gave one impression of a cat, insomuch as were one to wake her it seemed she would only stalk off to some other equally unlikely napping place, there to resume her slumber."

[Pablo Hernandez · Rating 4 out of 5]

A captivating novel, if only for its labyrinthine structure and thoughtful horseplay. Needless to say, it isn't easy to keep track of everything on a mere reading, given the stories' constant mutations and deviations. Easier to admire than to like, I presume, but it is highly recommended.

You keep reading because you don't really get it, hoping at the same time that by the time you've finished you will have understood it all. Parts of the book sound familiar; others strikingly original. The book ends, and you're left as dumbfounded as 100, 200 pages before. It is then that you realise that it wasn't really what you have read, but how you've read it, that is, immersed in the story within a story within a story ad infinitum because of your general inability to grasp a general scheme of things. Your incomprehension pushes you forward.

As such, the reader treads along, disoriented and rather uncertain as to what will happen, in the hope that an answer will be given. However, there isn't really an answer, and that is the joy of this book, a celebration of story-telling and literature in general. While often it may be too 'clever' for its own good (and, incidentally, to the detriment of the reader's understanding), its negation of straighforward storytelling turns it into a highly engrossing read. Still, the book is not about form and form only.

As I said, the book is not to be understood. But, literature is meant to be read and felt. Whoever said we're supposed to understand in order to like something?

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am loving this book. I was apprehensive at first, because I was looking for a realistic piece of fiction that I could just sink my teeth into, and the reviews said: if that's what you are looking for, then this is not the book for you. AND the book was compared to Italo Calvino's "If On a Winter's Night," which I HATED. But I am adoring this book, and I think the big difference is that I don't feel manipulated... It doesn't feel like an exercise. Rather, each of the different stories is compelling in its own right, and I love the way Jesse Ball drops from one story into the next... I can picture a series of doors or mirrors or windows, and one moment you are looking at a story one way, and then next you are outside the house looking through the window at the same scene, but from a different perspective. Or quite literally, in one example, you are reading a story that then becomes a film that someone is viewing in the next scene.

Thoroughly unique, utterly engaging.

...

Loved it all the way until the end, which didn't pull everything together in the way I had hoped it would. It ended in the same sort of dream-like reverie.

[Matthias Ferber]

Very intriguing brief review in the New Yorker (3/2/09 p. 71):

In an inversion of the Scheherazade legend, the hero of this dizzyingly circuitous novel must tell stories all night to a beautiful amnesiac, to keep her awake and alive. He begins by explaining himself: he writes pamphlets (sample title: “An Inquiry into the Ultimate Utility of the Silly, as Prefigured in the Grave and Inhospitable”) and works as a municipal inspector, in an office reachable only by ladder. His stories dissolve, unfinished, into other stories; characters—including a “guess artist” who reads minds with a thirty-three-per-cent accuracy rate, a girl who accepts only written communications (preferably typed), and a spurned Russian empress who forces her former lover to marry “the ugliest of women”—vanish and resurface; and reality is generally given the heave-ho. It’s a thrilling ride through an alternative New York (think Steven Millhauser on acid), where the tallest building extends hundreds of feet below ground and cabbies are paid in gold doubloons.

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Borges and Calvino drank themselves stupid and procreated (it could happen in their worlds), they would produce this book. This story has the labyrinthine mazes of Borges (is that redundant? Who cares?) and the atmospheric fairy tales and utter charm of Calvino. At times it also reminded me of a less-frightening House of Leaves, but that book owes a lot to Borges anyhow. Throw in some Scheherazade without the murdered women, and The Way Through Doors appears.

Selah Morse saves a young woman who has been hit by a car, and accompanies her to the hospital. She has completely lost her memory, and he pretends to be her boyfriend in order to stay with her at the hospital and take her home. The doctor advises that she be kept awake for the next eighteen hours to better recover her memory, so Selah tells her fantastic stories over the day and night, hoping she'll recognize herself. The stories make up the bulk of The Way Through Doors, and all of them seamlessly blend one into another, each as beautiful and fascinating as the last.