The divers' game A novel

Jesse Ball, 1978-

eBook - 2019

From the inimitable mind of award-winning author Jesse Ball, a novel about an unsettlingly familiar society that has renounced the concept of equality-and the devastating consequences of unmitigated power The old-fashioned struggle for fairness has finally been abandoned. It was a misguided endeavor. The world is divided into two groups, pats and quads. The pats may kill the quads as they like, and do. The quads have no recourse but to continue with their lives. The Divers' Game is a thinly veiled description of our society, an extreme case that demonstrates a truth: we must change or our world will collapse. What is the effect of constant fear on a life, or on a culture? The Divers' Game explores the consequences of violence thro...ugh two festivals, and through the dramatic and excruciating examination of a woman's final moments.Brilliantly constructed and achingly tender, The Divers' Game shatters the notion of common decency as the binding agent between individuals, forcing us to consider whether compassion is intrinsic to the human experience. With his signature empathy and ingenuity, Jesse Ball's latest work solidifies his reputation as one of contemporary fiction's most mesmerizing talents.

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Subjects
Genres
Dystopias
Published
[United States] : Harper Collins Publishers 2019.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Jesse Ball, 1978- (author)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9780062676115
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Ball (Census, 2018), a writer of exceptional and pensive imagination, adds another trenchant fable to his distinctively disquieting oeuvre. In an Orwellian society (one hears the beat of Animal Farm) leeched of goodness, an influx of refugees has precipitated a barbaric apartheid in which seekers are admitted, but then branded, mutilated, and settled in quadrants. The ""quads"" can work in town, but they have no rights and the natives, or pats, are armed with gas canisters and free to use them. Writing with blood-freezing sparseness, Ball illuminates this calamitously immoral place in loosely linked episodes. Two pat schoolgirls, Lethe and Lois, adventurous, irreverent, and vulnerable, accompany a teacher to a distant zoo, which holds one of the last living animals in this poisoned land, an ancient, ailing hare. Lessen, an even younger girl, is chosen to be the Infanta at a violent festival. One boy is roughly interrogated about the disappearance of another, and a woman writes a lacerating suicide letter summing up the sanctioned horrors of this cruelly unjust world, one that distressingly mirrors aspects of our own.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In his atmospheric, occasionally mesmerizing tale of haves and have-nots, Ball (Census) delivers a strident condemnation of inequality in an imagined nation. In the stilted exposition, a schoolteacher lectures his students about "the circumstances that led to the transformation of our society." Facing an influx of refugees, the society's leaders brand them, confine them to specified "quadrants," and arm their privileged citizens with gases with which to incapacitate, confuse, sicken, or kill the new underclass (or "quads"). The measures are executed with a sense of "vibrant morality," as the enforcers are secure in their conviction that "things done to those beneath are not properly violence." The novel comprises a series of vignettes: a teacher brings one of his students to a moribund zoo whose creatures are all dead; a quad girl prepares for her ceremonial role as the queen of a carnivalesque procession; a group of children play the dangerous "divers' game," in which they swim through a treacherous underwater channel connecting two ponds; a woman plans to kill herself to atone for her complicity in the society's brutal persecutions. Some episodes are gripping, while others are marred by philosophizing ("Do the places we inhabit confine us by their very nature?"). Still, the novel's depiction of life in this dystopian world is eerie and suffused with symbolic weight. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Sept.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The elusive and ever evolving Ball (Census, 2018, etc.) returns with a radical new novel about a divisive future that takes inequality to grotesque extremes.If they don't teach Ball's work in college by now, they should, if only as an example of an author whose books are so different from one another that a reader might not even recognize them as the work of one person save for Ball's spare prose, eccentric imagination, and pinpoint narrative composition. Perhaps he's a collective, like Banksy. The story opens with students Lethe and Lois in class the day before a mysterious holiday called Ogias' Day, which hasn't happened in more than 50 years. Through their discussions with their drunk, grieving teacher, Mandred, we learn more about their world. Some time ago, an influx of refugees triggered a politician to suggest an extreme solution: They can come in, "as long as we can tell them apart." Over time, this led to the development of a lower caste of people with no legal standing, all branded with a tattoo of a red hat on their faces, and forced to amputate their thumbs. Any legal citizen, "Pats," can also kill these "quads" at any time, but on Ogias' day, the tables are turned. From here, the story flips through different characters in different circumstances but all set in this curious new societal matrix. We learn about a child sacrifice ceremony called the Infanta and about the titular Divers' Game, a legendary and highly risky channel by which children might escape their fate. It's imaginatively horrifying, even if it doesn't always make sense, and readers who appreciate Ball's keen, melancholic, and often sadly satirical view of human society will likely appreciate this timely assessment of where division might take us and how it affects the generations that come after us.A dystopian novel in the vein of The Handmaid's Tale, viewed through the children who suffer from our mistakes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.