Like many people, I’ve had a rough night of sleep on occasion. For whatever reason, there’s too much light polluting my room or Brisbane has decided to snatch away the evening breeze. There might be something important on the next day, or perhaps I’m too overstimulated to settle. Be that as it may, I’m careful not to throw around the term ‘insomnia’ lightly. Mostly for fear of bringing it upon myself, but also, as Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq reminds us, it’s a condition you don’t want to associate with unnecessarily.
I opened this book hoping to learn a little more about the phenomenon that is chronic insomnia. I was intrigued to see how this established French author could somehow translate the abstraction of twenty years with an incredibly poor, or non-existent, sleep schedule.
She begins the book with the very words, ‘I lost sleep. I retraced my steps but sleep wasn’t following me.’ and this confession is poignant. The prologue itself continues as a short introduction of Marie herself and a reflection on how the book came to be as a matter of inevitability — for a writer who cannot sleep will surely write about it. Moving from poetic description into drier dictation, the tone of this short prelude unwittingly reflects the tedious balance between introspect and literature review that preoccupies each essay of this book.
Darrieussecq is quick to quote anyone who shares her complex dance with sleep, pulling evidence and commentary from anywhere that feels relevant; fragments from Victor Hugo, Proust and Kafka. But as someone still reeling from the beautifully vulnerable prologue, this sudden and unrelenting saturation of secondary sources complicated my expectations of the memoir. Structured as a selection of mini essays, I found the material and the command of language compelling, but yearned for more of Marie’s personal experience.
It’s around page twenty that we come upon our first pocket of personal anecdote. It’s woven in so seamlessly, you almost don’t realise you’re half a page deep and completely caught up in it. It’s a plain discussion about the author’s exploration of sleeping pills in their hundreds of iterations. Then again, on page 36, we are dipped into a beautifully witty and honest recount of the author’s relationship with alcohol abuse — all in the name of sleep. It’s these passages that give the voice of Marie a frightening credibility. The clarity and compassion with which she renders feelings of dependence and addiction, reflect the place this book holds in Darrieussecq’s career. As the author of almost twenty previously published works, her confident command of language contributes to a fearless, pointed and often sassy exploration of her own opinions.
This confidence is scratched into the structure of the book itself. There is a stream of consciousness to the movement between subjects, that may be a deliberate choice or a consequence of writing portions of the text in the midst of insomnia itself. This is a book that I closed feeling impacted and informed by, but had trouble isolating the exact ideas that inspired this impression. Darrieussecq’s exploration of sleep reaches across topics and moments, moving from alcohol to travel, and the nature of a fully networked world where ‘no one is alone in their bed anymore’. This seamless shift between ideas has a tangible impact on the reader.
All too ironically, I actually dozed off in the midst of this gentle read. This was not in spite of its suffering author, or because the writing had lost its steady momentum, but almost the opposite? There’s a poetic concision to Darrieussecq’s writing that moves us through her ideas so organically, you find yourself still echoing the preceding thought when the next has already begun —like an echoing chamber of sparsely connected dreams. It’s the reason I found myself reaching for this book in the late afternoons, not wanting something outrageous, but a string of words to accompany the mulling that happens in that space between the afternoon, and evening.
Sleepless is a novel I was happy to read and thankful for its regular momentum. Any longer and the novel would be tedious. This is a book that is searching. It scours literature and traverses the minds of those who dread the turn of night, searching for comfort and sense in the suffering of others. Without any real personal resolution, it offers no comforting solution or alternative, only the hope that ‘in those awakenings, perhaps in the bedroom, or with our forehead pressed against the window… we might find insomnia without fatigue, we might remember nights as the dimensions of days.’
