When I saw the description of Marie Darrieussecq’s book Sleepless in Fitzcarraldo’s promotional materials, I knew I had to read it, especially as insomnia is something I have experienced periodically over the past 15 years. Beautifully translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Sleepless is an erudite exploration of sleeplessness, weaving together the author’s personal experiences of the condition with those of other notable sufferers, typically writers. It’s a difficult book to describe accurately as so much of its power comes from being immersed in this dizzying condition, caught in the hinterland between restful sleep and waking up refreshed.
At times, in the madness of no sleep, it’s like oscillating between two worlds. Alive, but in a dead end life, without birth, without death, and moments that is both static and spinning. (p. 98)
Structurally, the book comprises a series of fragments and essays, supplemented by a wealth of footnotes, photographs and illustrations, all of which add texture to Darrieussecq’s eminently readable meditation. It’s a great book for dipping into, best read in small chunks to appreciate all the details in full.
As Darrieussecq notes, Proust is the literary king of insomnia. A longstanding sufferer himself, Proust opens In Search of Lost Time with a description of one of literature’s most famous failed bedtimes. It’s an experience Proust is intimately familiar with himself as we see from the following passage.
I’m living in a sort of death, punctuated by brief awakenings. Proust writes from within insomnia, and it is from insomnia that he elicits his writing. Insomnia is his laboratory, and it is first and foremost an experiment in time. It is the place where memory is written, the room containing the rooms of the past. (p. 46)
As I was reading this book, I couldn’t help but wonder why so many writers experience chronic insomnia – the distinguished roll call also includes Kafka, Kawabata, Huysmans, Philip Roth, Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf, Natalie Sarraute, Leonard Cohen, Celine and many more. While Darrieussecq doesn’t offer a definitive hypothesis or explanation, she does give us a fascinating array of examples, peppering her text with various stories and reports through the years. Proust, for instance, lined his walls with cork in the hope of creating an atmosphere conducive to sleep. Others, such as Huysmans and Hemmingway resorted to cataloguing and making lists when woken during the night – tactics played out thorough the characters in their books.
These discussions of literary insomniacs are supplemented by other representations of sleeplessness in the broader cultural arena, touching on portrayals in films – Solaris, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey feature prominently here – alongside books and other related media. As the hour between 3 and 4 am is often the most punishing time for poor sleepers, it seems no coincidence that the devil knocks on the door at 3.33 am in Stuart Rosenberg’s classic film The Amityville Horror…
Moreover, Darrieussecq occasionally extends her gaze into the political arena, highlighting some of the social barriers to conducive conditions for sleep. While everyone should have access to a safe place to sleep, many individuals are denied this fundamental human right through no fault of their own. Social inequalities and injustices are often to blame – and, as Darrieussecq points out, migrants, asylum seekers, the homeless and those living in poverty face significant challenges in this area, conditions the author observes first-hand when she reports on conditions in the migrant camps in Calais for French TV.
Living in a place that can be easily erased. Non-places, non-camps, situated in a country but also outside of it, outside political geography. Places peopled with non-subjects, at the same time detained and refused entry: non-people. Non-persons. And when you are a non-person, you non-sleep, non-sleeping is all there is. (p. 148)
As someone who frequently experiences bouts of acute insomnia myself, sometimes lasting up to two weeks, I found the author’s personal reflections on her experiences with the condition especially interesting. For Darrieussecq, her problems with sleeping began shortly after the birth of her first baby – a son born two months prematurely due to her malformed uterus, an issue triggered by her exposure to harmful drugs while developing in her mother’s womb. Sleeping tablets help a little, but these treatments come with their own problems and challenges, not least the requirement to persuade a doctor to issue the tablets in the first place!
Real sleeping pills, ones that work, are hard to obtain without a prescription. It means having a doctor, going through the ritual of seducing the doctor, and sometimes the pharmacist; it means having connections, conniving in some way. Whether you like it or not, you’re engaged in a relationship, you stick with the prescriber who comes up with the goods, you move on from the schmucks. (p. 40)
And because these medications affect people differently, overdoses of sleeping pills and elixirs can pose a significant risk – an issue compounded by the adverse impact of these treatments on our short-term memory. Once again, the literary world is full of near misses with these drugs – some accidental, others deliberate. In Brazil, Clarice Lispector almost perished while smoking in bed, when, under the influence of sleeping pills, her mattress caught fire. In another incident, Virginia Woolf had an early brush with death at the hands of Veranol, several years before her suicide by drowning.
Before she gave herself over forever to the stones and the river, Virginia Woolf was rescued, at the age of thirty-one, from an overdose of veronal, by an injection of strychnine, a lot of coffee, and whacks from a wet towel. (pp. 51–52)
Other writers deliberately overdose on sleeping aids to commit suicide, choosing ‘the big sleep’, often at an early age. Akutagawa and Cesare Pavese are notable examples here, but there are many more in the wider literary arena.
Musing on her own relationship with insomnia, Darrieussecq writes humorously about trialling a plethora of bedtime rituals and sleeping aids, from fasting, acupuncture, hypnosis and meditation to various acupressure mats, gravity blankets, and other weird and (not so) wonderful treatments. Sadly, none of these miracle cures deliver a sustainable solution for Darrieussecq despite the myriad of claims from enthusiastic manufacturers.
Following a polysomnographic analysis of her sleep patterns, Darrieussecq is deemed to be experiencing hypervigilance, a condition that means she wakes up to 20 times an hour (far more than the 2 or 3 micro-awakening per hour many of us experience in a typical night). Consequently, she must maintain a strict bedtime routine, getting up and going to bed at exactly the same time each day including weekends; otherwise, she will fail to connect with her ‘sleep train – the one that arrives approximately every two hours’. No more reading, listening to music or playing with the kids under the covers for Marie – her bed is for sleep and sex, but nothing else.
Thanks to this drastic scheduling of my time and space, I fall asleep. Deeply. It works. At midnight I rest my head on the pillow. At five past midnight the train arrives, and after a brief trip through the hypnagogic mountains, I am no longer there. It’s extraordinary. I often want to go to bed earlier, but no, midnight is when my locomotive turns into a pumpkin.
Alas, I continue to wake up at 4.04 a.m. In short, after two train cycles, I need at least one more for a restful night. (p. 208)
So much of this creative memoir / archive of sleeplessness resonates with me personally, particularly the horror of waking up between 3 and 4 at night, stranded in the interminable limbo of insomnia until the alarm goes off at 6. Moreover, the book’s vignette-style structure reflects the fragmentary nature of this condition, capturing the freewheeling association between a myriad of thoughts as the mind flits from one topic to another – once again, a feverish state I am intimately familiar with.
In short, this is a fascinating treatise on a frustrating condition that many of us will experience at some point in our lives. Recommended reading for any literary lover, especially those with an interest in the mysteries of sleep!
Sleepless is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions; my thanks to the publishers and the Independent Alliance for kindly providing a review copy.
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