The Book of Losman is the debut novel by K.E. Semmel, a writer and translator who lives in Scottsville, New York. Semmel tells the story of Daniel Losman, an American literary translator who has emigrated to Denmark. Losman is trying to discover the cause of his Tourette syndrome, and is willing to go to great lengths with an experimental pill that retrieves his earliest memories.
The storyline, along with the backdrop of a bustling Copenhagen, provides a rich landscape. Semmel’s penetrating and well-researched insights into a man with an often-misconceived neurological condition—which the author has dealt with since early childhood—is tender, poetic, and thought-provoking. Elements of surprise and a feeling of shared discovery make the journey with Losman worth every page. As a bonus, Semmel’s deft touch helps turn some risky medical experiments into laugh-out-loud moments.
I spoke with Semmel by email about his novel’s origin, the power and risks of memory, and the challenges of writing about Tourette syndrome.
Geoff Graser: Your book opens with an epigraph from Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel’s In Search of Memory, which in part says, “Without the mental time travel of memory, we would have no awareness of our personal history.” In your Author’s Note, you also write that you are “fascinated” by memory. Could you talk about this fascination and where it might have started?
K.E. Semmel: In some sense, isn’t memory any writer’s bread and butter? We mine our experiences, our memories, every time we sit down at our computers. Even when we’re not writing an autobiography or memoir, we’re incorporating elements of our past in our work—whether by accident or design. I trace my interest in memory back to childhood. I was a lonely kid. I had friends, I had family, but even when I was around other people I felt alone much of the time. Like I was on the outside looking in. As much as it pains me to say it, this is something that has trailed me into adulthood, and I’ve tried over the years to understand why I feel this way. Like any kid or budding novelist, I invented stories, characters, conversations, and scenes, etc. I did this for a variety of reasons, but chiefly it was for entertainment or enlightenment (to explore ideas I was tinkering with). I still do this, but now that I’m nearly fifty these inventions are—to a larger extent than ever—more about understanding myself and my place in the world. And part of that, for me, is creativity and fiction-making. I usually “write” whole scenes in my head, sometimes over the course of months or years, before I put them down on the page. The Book of Losman was my attempt to envision a world in which my protagonist could, via a little yellow pill, return to his formative memories. To figure out who he was, and why.
With memories, you see, we can analyze what we said or did, we can piece together who we were and make sense of who we are. That’s powerful stuff, an invisible ball of energy. Even if all we remember are bare snatches, something you said or did, perhaps. But we can also inadvertently alter the past by reimagining these snatches of memory, too; knowingly or unknowingly, we can subtly change things we regret. It’s a form of self-deception, and I try not to do that, but perhaps it’s inevitable? We’re limited by our perceptions, after all, and our perceptions can be faulty. Imagine memory as a long, heavy chain extending all the way back into the fog of our past. There’s bound to be broken or damaged links.
But at their most basic, memories are a form of time travel as Kandel’s quote suggests, and that’s something I explore very deliberately in The Book of Losman. When Losman takes the pill and relives memories long since buried deep in his mind, he experiences a thrill of discovery. It’s like watching an old home movie he’d never seen. The problem, at least for him, is that he’s searching for a very, very specific childhood memory. It’s elusive, slippery as a fish. Even with the pill, the gallery of memories he’d accumulated throughout his life are too numerous. For all their charm, memories are fallible. They dissolve into nothingness at the slightest touch, and they can be cloudy too, exceedingly unreliable. Two people who discuss a shared experience may have very different interpretations of that experience. It happens all the time, because our perceptions vary. Our individual focus varies. Losman wants to find out why he has tics by exploring his memories—already a dubious proposition—but when he goes back in time, so to speak, he discovers that finding the truth is not that simple. Never is.
GG: How does this fascination with memory connect to The Book of Losman and your inspiration to write it?
KES: The idea of writing about a little pill that restores lost (or faded) memories has long been swirling around my brain. We often ask ourselves or our friends, “What’s the first memory you can recall?” And that’s the starting point. Fiction can be and do many things, and I wanted to write a story that pierces this question and goes back even further. I’ve been writing fiction for 30 some years and, to date, my total published output equals four short stories in literary magazines, one of which no longer exists. Given how much I’ve written, thousands of pages, that’s a truly paltry number of publications. As a writer, it’s very easy—too easy—to lose faith in your work. The Book of Losman was the first manuscript I ever wrote in which the teacher’s maxim “write what you know” applies.
I spent ten years writing a novel called In the Country of the Monstrous Creatures. It was a loose retelling of the epic Beowulf, the original Scandinavian crime novel. I was inspired to write that book because I was translating a succession of crime novels—The Caller, The Absent One, The Seventh Child—and I thought it’d be interesting to bring that kind of crime novel to my home region in Western New York. I’ve always been a fan of Beowulf, so it seemed like a natural thing to incorporate a monster that goes on a killing spree in the Southern Tier. But there needed to be a reason for the killing spree, and that reason became fracking. I wrote most of the novel before New York State banned the procedure, but I set the book close to the Pennsylvania border, which hadn’t. In any event, that book took so long to write in part because I had to research fracking and in part because I was translating novels, working a full-time job, and trying to be a good husband and father. I actually landed an agent to rep the book, and he did a great job of getting it in front of some outstanding editors and publishers. I have forty plus rejection notes—most of which are quite laudatory of my work. It’s weirdly inspiring to be rejected and uplifted at the same time. But in the end, in spite of the kind notes, no one took a chance on the novel, and I gave up on it.
The first draft of The Book of Losman emerged in about two years. Simply put: I wanted to write a speculative fiction involving a world I was familiar with so that I didn’t have to spend ten years writing something that might end up, like everything else I’ve written, languishing in a box in my office. I write for the experience of writing, sure, I enjoy finding out what’s going to happen in a story—but I also want to, you know, publish books. I’m not getting any younger, after all.
GG: Losman is an American who has lived in Denmark for well over a decade. There are flashbacks to his time growing up in the U.S. and subsequent visits home, but what ultimately led you to choosing Denmark as the setting for the novel?
KES: I knew the story would take place in Copenhagen. I wanted the story set there. The Book of Losman, especially the first chapter, playfully reimagines a scene and some characters from Simon Fruelund’s collection Milk, which I translated. Since Losman is, like I used to be, a literary translator, I felt it was important that he live in Denmark. I don’t live there anymore, but I’ve always wanted to explore my expat experience in fiction. To my knowledge, there are very few novels by Americans set in Copenhagen (Thomas Kennedy’s Copenhagen Quartet comes to mind), and I liked the idea of writing something that took place in a setting that would be unique for most readers—especially since I have a special relationship with Denmark.
Setting for me is always a hugely important part of any story. When people read The Book of Losman, I want them to see Copenhagen—or at least my fictionalized version of it. That means seeing the city through Losman’s perspective. One of the most important things writers need to do, in my view, is to incorporate setting in their work. Show us what city we’re in, say, or what time of day or year it is. Describe characters, show us what they look like. Show us how they move through or interact with space. Without this information, we’re left with what I call the Pocoyo Effect. Pocoyo is a Spanish cartoon for kids—a fantastic cartoon—set in a no-place: a blank white canvas, an empty space. This works as a cartoon but not in fiction. At any given moment, we live in a specific time and a specific place. We’re surrounded by things, and our senses are always taking their measure, even if subconsciously. So, to me, the art of fiction (the art of all writing, actually) is in the way things are described. I want to see how characters—and by extension, their authors—view the world.
About Denmark. I don’t generally talk about themes—that feels like something for Comp 101—but one red thread through the book is loneliness, isolation. Losman is a foreigner who lives alone. He’s shy and introverted. Although he speaks and translates Danish, he’s not Danish and he struggles to make friends. This is partly because he’s got Tourette syndrome and doesn’t want people to know it. But Danes are also notoriously difficult to get close to unless, as in my case, you marry a Dane and get absorbed by her circle of family and friends. Being an outsider in a foreign country, in other words, is an important part of Losman’s identity. And translation, in this way, has a dual meaning.
All this probably makes the book sound like a bit of a downer, but there’s real humor in the novel too. At least I hope readers think so. Life is a comic adventure, really, filled with mistakes and miscommunications. Fiction can reflect that.
GG: How does Losman’s occupation as literary translator play into this novel? How have you incorporated your experience as a translator?
KES: Well, Losman’s rather precarious income is derived solely from his occupation, so in that sense literary translation is baked into the narrative in a very practical way. But literary translation, like writing, can also be a lonely job—at the very least, you have to be alone to do the work—so it adds to Losman’s sense of loneliness. Perhaps because he’s alone, he’s someone who interprets, or you could say translates, his experience on a daily basis. I think of this novel as something of a Cubist painting. Losman’s identity is all mixed up, and he’s trying to put it together in a way that he can recognize. An early draft of the novel, where I inserted a fractured fairy tale with a Cubist narrator, made this connection explicit—too explicit, actually, and that’s why I removed it. There are plenty of books coming out these days titled The Book of ___. (Kelly Link’s The Book of Love pops immediately to mind.) Because of that, I had doubts about calling mine The Book of Losman, but in the end I chose to keep the title as is because I want readers to experience the acts of translation, of writing, of character discovery in the same way as reading a book. They’re all interpretations.
My experience as a translator is imprinted in the DNA of the novel. In fact, if I’d never translated a single word, I never would have written this book. Not only because I’m playfully re-imagining work I translated by Simon Fruelund, but also because translation is an act of joy. I have some mean, sarcastic fun with the completely fictionalized book (and author) Losman is translating in the novel, but the truth is, working with words on such a granular level—transmitting them across languages and cultures—is fun as hell. And writing The Book of Losman was, too.
GG: How did you balance Losman’s work on understanding his Tourette syndrome with making sure that’s not the core of his identity?
KES: This is a great question, one that I took great pains to navigate with The Book of Losman. Part of the answer lies in my own view of Tourette syndrome. For HuffPost I wrote about my experience growing up with it, about not being diagnosed until I was well into my adulthood. These shitty tics have always been part of my life, even if I didn’t have an official diagnosis until I was 43. What I don’t want—what I absolutely never want—is for readers to conflate Losman’s story with my story. I didn’t write a memoir, I wrote a novel, and I hope that’s obvious for readers. Given the weird things that happen in the book, it should be, right? But Tourette syndrome complicates that.
To some extent, Losman’s identity has been shaped by his Tourette syndrome, including the avoidance strategies he employs in public, because that’s something that is true for me. Tourette syndrome is not the core of my identity, but it certainly is a huge part of the reason that I don’t go out of my way to make new friends or go out when I don’t have to. I’ve become deeply invested in understanding my tics. After my diagnosis, I read numerous books on the subject, I watched videos, I scheduled a follow-up visit with my doctor just to talk to him, and I’ve even started doing Comprehensive Behavioral Intervention for Tics (CBIT) training. Beyond ticcing less frequently, what I’m particularly interested in is why I have tics. What is the root of them in me? When it comes to Tourette, this is still an open question. An open book, you might say. Nobody really knows.
So, in this sense, I did use my own experience with the condition and transferred it onto Losman. Shortly after my diagnosis, I realized I finally had a container in which to put my idea of reimagining memories using an experimental drug. Through a fictional character, I thought, I could explore the why of Tourette. When people think about Tourette syndrome—if they think about it at all—what they think about is often coprolalia, the very public shouting or swearing that television and other media like to broadcast widely, but it’s also a version that impacts “only” one in ten Tourette patients. Many don’t realize that there are people among them with Tourette syndrome, people who, like Losman, make a concerted effort to not tic in public. I wanted Losman’s experience to be true, I wanted to make sure he wasn’t just a stereotype shouting obscenities in a supermarket.
I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that there is no simple why to be found in the novel. I am never interested in simple whys. What I’m interested in, what motivated me to write the book, is not finding answers to nagging questions I have about Tourette syndrome. What interests me is Losman and his journey.
Geoff Graser is a writer whose home base is Rochester, New York, though he’s currently living in Brazil. His work has appeared in Narratively, Cleaver Magazine, USA Today, FanSided, Santa Clara Review, Aethlon: The Journal of Literature, and other publications. Graser has been a writing resident at the Ragdale Foundation. He holds a Master’s in Journalism from Syracuse University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College.
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