A restless inquiry into the cultural and psychic sources of insomnia
by one of contemporary French literature's most elegant voices.
Plagued by insomnia for twenty years, Marie Darrieussecq turns her
attention to the causes, implications, and consequences of
sleeplessness: a nocturnal suffering that culminates at 4 a.m. and then
defines the next day. "Insomniac mornings are dead mornings," she
observes. Prevented from falling asleep by her dread of exhaustion the
next day, Darrieussecq turns to hypnosis, psychoanalysis, alcohol,
pills, and meditation. Her entrapment within this spiraling anguish
prompts her inspired, ingenious search across literature, geopolitical
history, psychoanalysis, and her own experience to better understand
where insomnia comes from and what it might mean. There are those, she
writes, in Rwanda, whose vivid memories of genocide leave them awake and
transfixed by complete horror; there is the insomnia of the unhoused,
who have nowhere to put their heads down. The hyperconnection of urban
professional life transforms her bedroom from a haven to a dormant
electrified node.
Ranging between autobiography, clinical observation, and criticism,
Sleepless is a graceful, inventive meditation by one of the most
daring, inventive novelists writing today.
