Losman and I are identical. I often felt like I was reading about myself. So much so, that by page seventy-five, I was so agitated I almost stopped reading altogether.
Settle down, Kyle emailed me first. My brother introduced us via email. Semmel wrote an essay about his Tourette Syndrome. My brother thought it might interest me. That was months ago. We’ve exchanged a few emails since then. He let me know when his book was released. Weeks later, he notified me that he linked one of my articles on X. In that email, he asked if I read The Book of Losman yet.
I replied: I haven’t gotten it. I pre-read a chapter on Amazon and found that it badly triggered my tics. Tourette is a strange disorder. Doctors and researchers can’t explain the biology of what’s going on in our brains. There isn’t a whole lot of rhyme or reason why our tics—our unwanted movements and vocalizations—become more pervasive at times. Stress is involved. For me, caffeine is too, but the power of suggestion never fails. If I think about tics, I tic. If I read about them, well, all hell breaks loose.
After reading that chapter on Amazon, I turned to my wife Susan and said “I don’t think I’m going to be able to read this book.” But then, my loyalty to another author with TS, a friend of my brother’s no less, got to me. I read the book. Here’s the blurb from Semmel’s website:
Meet Daniel Losman—an American in Copenhagen, translating books and living a solitary existence. His longtime girlfriend has left him, and the only highlights in his life are encounters with an offbeat artist he thinks he’s in love with and weekends with his three-year-old son, whom he worries has inherited his Tourette Syndrome.
When Losman learns of a new drug designed to locate the root of his Tourette through childhood memories, he’s lured by promises of a cure and visits the mysterious lab that developed the drug. Initially, what he discovers buried deep within his brain rejuvenates him. But the more Losman takes the drug, the more he needs it. Losman steals some of the pills and locks himself away in his apartment, only to quickly find himself trapped inside his own mind. There’s a way out of his head, but it will come at a price…
So, Tourette Syndrome and sci-fi. When Semmel conceived this story, he should have written in his notebook “Target audience? Jeff Cann.” These two topics draw me in like no other. Losman’s tics mirror my own. Neither of us have coprolalia, involuntary outbursts of obscene words and inappropriate remarks that most people mistakenly assume all with Tourette display, but we both grunt, we clamp our eyelids shut, and jut out our bottom lip to blow air across our face. We also both dwell in the embarrassment and self-disgust of the disorder.
Other ways Losman and I are similar: We long for a magic bullet to cure our Tourette; we harbor self-fulfilling prophesies that Tourette torpedoes our relationships; we’re hypervigilant of our offspring, constantly searching for inherited Tourette symptoms; and our significant others—his ex, my wife—admonish us for surrendering too much importance and power to Tourette Syndrome. To quote my wife, Susan, “Yes, you have Tourette, you can’t fix it, you just have to accept it.”
I told Semmel that Losman’s life seemed to be taken from my own experiences. I told him that this was easily the best novel I’ve read about how Tourette can impact all facets of someone’s life. I even asked Susan to read those brutal seventy-five first pages to gain a better understanding of what goes on in my brain.
So what did I think of the book as a whole? I’m going to give it 4.5 stars. Five stars for the accurate portrayal of Tourette Syndrome in an adult, especially Losman’s awkward budding relationship with his neighbor. I’ll give the ambitious and wholly original science fiction plot four stars. This aspect of the book isn’t perfect, but I found it inventive and creepy, and it kept me plowing through the book to see how things turned out.
I’ve dedicated about ten percent of the real estate on my blog, maybe seventy or eighty thousand words, to Tourette awareness. If I took all those posts, those anecdotes, those thoughts and emotions, and distilled them down into one fictional character, I’d be left with Losman. If you’re remotely interested in understanding the Tourette experience, read this book. Or, if you want to read a cool sci-fi story that takes place in Copenhagen (an interesting city I’ve never once previously considered), and you couldn’t care less about Tourette Syndrome, read the book anyway. My guess is you’ll find both plots in The Book of Losman interesting, educational and entertaining.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Author
