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earth222emilie's review against another edition
3.0
I'm in my memoir era !! Darrieussecq is a clever, compelling writer. This took me forever to read because I have my own sleep issues, that somehow felt exacerbated by (at least for the first half) the pessimistic tone of perpetual insomnia. Ironically I always slept worse after reading a few chapters. I more so enjoyed the final few essays, particularly the sections on the forest and the anthropocene. And I now find myself anthologising literature on sleep no matter what I read, finding sleep at the centre of all things in my life. I'm left with the peculiar sensation that Darrieussecq's hypnagogia is catching, or maybe I've just found a name for my own experiences. I think I mused more on sleep whilst reading this than I ever have in my whole life. The plethora of classical literature references were very coolly interwoven IMO, but I did sometimes feel slightly spoiled.
haunted_klaus's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Stunning. Every tangent is worth it, the language is unlike anything I’ve encountered.
kate66's review against another edition
4.0
I've not read any of Marie Darrieussecq's work so her name was new to me. This is not a work of fiction but a discourse of the problem of insomnia which she has suffered from for many years.
The book covers the experiences of other insomniacs eg Proust, Woolf, Kafka wondering if it is the act of writing that causes the insomnia; Ms Darrieussecq herself says she used to sleep well until children came along but even after the initial exhausting feeding stages sleep continued to elude her.
Another idea is that sleeplessness becomes a habit as taking sleeping tablets or alcohol eventually lose their efficacy.
Towards the end is a whole section about our relationship with the animal world and perhaps our knowledge that we destroy everything we come into contact with is disturbing our sleep.
Thankfully I've only suffered sporadic bouts of insomnia at stressful times in my life. This book wouldn't provide any solutions but the contemplation of why is just as fascinating.
Thanks to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy.
The book covers the experiences of other insomniacs eg Proust, Woolf, Kafka wondering if it is the act of writing that causes the insomnia; Ms Darrieussecq herself says she used to sleep well until children came along but even after the initial exhausting feeding stages sleep continued to elude her.
Another idea is that sleeplessness becomes a habit as taking sleeping tablets or alcohol eventually lose their efficacy.
Towards the end is a whole section about our relationship with the animal world and perhaps our knowledge that we destroy everything we come into contact with is disturbing our sleep.
Thankfully I've only suffered sporadic bouts of insomnia at stressful times in my life. This book wouldn't provide any solutions but the contemplation of why is just as fascinating.
Thanks to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy.
emsemsems's review against another edition
1.0
‘Please leave me oysters. With a glass of Chablis.’
A disappointing read. For starters, it's so stuffed with spoilers (be it of literature/film). Being 'robbed’ like that was just unacceptable. If you want to read Perec, Simenon, Kafka, Colette, Proust, Jean Rhys, Kundera, Beckett, Zweig (to name a few from the massive list) for the first time anyway, then I wouldn’t recommend reading MD’s book. Truly bizarre ‘how’ she had done it as well. She literally tells the readers (down to the littlest details) which character(s) dies in those novels (and how/ and why). And I don’t even want to rant about the film spoilers, it just makes me mad. A very clever book title, deceptive. If this was ‘MD’s Diaries’ (which would be most appropriate), it would be terrible in terms of marketing, but at least the ‘spoilers’ would have been more excusable.
Laden with ‘references’ to ‘celebrities’ who had experienced (or died from) insomnia. Lots of photos, so actually not a very ‘long’ book. But some of the things she mentioned, and some of the photos she had chosen to have in her book? Suspiciously like ‘trauma porn’ (and kind of uncomfortable because it’s not even ‘her trauma’ — for instance there are photos of the ‘Chernobyl’ nuclear accident, and a photograph of a razor cutting a human eye). And then she waffles those photos with (A LOT of) photos of her hotel rooms/‘travels’ (she even links her website on the page just to note that MORE can be found there). I don’t even know what to make of it. And honestly, I don’t want to either.
’Yes, it was too much. But I was incapable of stopping. A life of abstinence is not a life. And as to reducing, alas, my superego was not up for that. It was too much to ask: it was already looking after my figure, my exercise, my self-discipline, my manners; it needed — in order to contend with all that.’
But most of all, I didn’t like how she romanticised medication and substance abuse in the first half of the book. I am not easily triggered by these ‘topics’ (including self-harm and ‘suicide’), but I can imagine there are people who can be. And it’s just kind of messed up that it was written the way it was written. It’s the ‘tone’ and how it was phrased, really (and maybe if it was darkly comic, it would have been more acceptable, but this was just sort of disturbing — in the sense that the writer’s extreme ignorance is just so — shocking). It even feels like the writer actually ‘idolises’ the dead and famous writers/artists who were insomniacs. As if to validate her own self-destructive behaviours when she tells the readers about theirs?
And at one point, quite early on in the book, the writer confessed about how she ‘almost killed’ her ‘insomniac friend’ once by basically prescribing for him and encouraging him to take some pills. And she wrote it in a way that is meant to be funny (and as if like is a completely ‘normal’ and friendly thing to do)? Or not? Because if it’s not meant to be ‘funny’, then I don’t sense any kind of apologetic or guilty feelings from the writing either, which I can’t decide if that’s better or worse? And following that, she added a photo of her and a different insomniac friend and captioned it ‘Insomniac selfie’. And later on, the bit on her experience in the ‘forests’ of Cameroon was — I can’t even — . Will just have to leave it at that.
‘Air France, so white, so beautiful, — I have my French passport and I have money. — the crowd is alarming, the rain is adding to the racket, — I feel dizzy with how exhausting, rushed, and also comic everything here is, because the Kinshasans flying out to Panama are making fun of the whole situation, and of me in particular. — an Air France stewardess gives me a glass of champagne — and I already feel infinitely safer, and I am infinitely grateful for the existence of France — .’
To conclude and clarify, I’m rating this based on how ‘I feel’ about the book. This is definitely a well-composed book. ‘Clever’, I would even say. But ‘careless’. And I’m definitely not the ‘suitable’ insomniac and/or reader for it. This is probably the first (and hopefully only) book published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (one of my favourite (if not my favourite) publishers of all-time) that just doesn’t make sense to me. It’s not even because ‘the writing did not resonate with me’. I should have known better knowing that the intro of the book includes an endorsement by ‘Elle’ (presumably the magazine).
‘A funny, moving, metaphysical, and novelistic self-portrait that is also a portrait of our times’ — Elle
‘Our times’? Surely not applicable to 'everyone'. But perhaps someone who reads Elle magazines often might be able to appreciate MD’s writing better.