Now in paperback, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary
Arabic literature.
What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human
states--metaphorically called death's shadow or considered the very
pinnacle of indolence--be envisioned as action and agency? And what do
we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand
ourselves to be?
Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President
Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The
Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing
on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political
analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an
assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around
their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity.
"My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional
sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking," El
Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts
conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory,
dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables,
in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and
generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of
stifling dualities and constrictions.
