“All our body wants is to sleep, it wants to leave us, head back to the stable, a worn-out horse,” writes Marie Darrieussecq, at which I, a worn-out human, think yes. In a recent interview, Darrieussecq reflected on how much of her work is concerned with inhabiting. Who has a right to inhabit this planet, she asks, and who doesn’t? Though she was talking about her novel Crossed Lines, in which a Parisian woman finds her life becoming bound up with that of a young Nigerian refugee, she could just as well be referring to Sleepless (Pas Dormir in the original French), a book that is – what? A memoir/interrogation/painting/song of insomnia, her own and that of others. It’s a book about where, why, how we sleep and don’t sleep; about how to find a place in the world where sleep can happen, a stable for the worn-out horse.
Sleepless isn’t a book that’s straightforward to convey, at least not briefly. On the page it’s fragmentary, footnoted and studded with photos and illustrations. It’s panoramic in its survey of insomniac literature, and also softly intimate where it touches on the author’s own life. In its range and genre it’s unpindownable. Darrieussecq is one of the most prolific and distinguished living writers in France with a truly impressive body of work. All her familiar acuity, humour, humility and intensity are evident in Sleepless.
A proficient insomniac myself, I worried about reading this book. There are no two ways about it: a lot of not sleeping over a long period is horrific, and my vigilant, superstitious, somewhat despotic brain is easily provoked back into battle with sleep. Darrieussecq does not pull her punches. “Relieve me of consciousness, the appalling consciousness of sleeplessness,” she writes. And: “I only listen to serious insomniacs, because they dance with death.” Yes, I think once more; insomnia has made me dance with death, at first a manic dance, now a long, slow dance of cooperative footwork learned over many nights. Anyone who’s been bludgeoned by insomnia will find their experience in this book, graphic and fierce. Its tone is often agitated, alarmed, by virtue of its candour. How could it not be?
Yet it is so eccentric, intelligent and searching that it never gets swamped and never swamps. Its energy is electric, its prose musical. And Penny Hueston’s translation superbly gets to all that’s spiky and wry in Darrieussecq’s prose, as well as all that’s immensely tender. Of her bed she says: “I boarded and investigated those four square metres as if I was the captain of a flagship. You can write well in bed, and read even better, you can give birth to babies … there’s no housework or ironing to do there. You also get extremely depressed there. When you’re in bed all day long, the flagship sinks. And when you start drinking there, it’s all over.” Later, of the births of her children, she writes: “Each new astonishing arrival chased away beneath her little feet whatever small amount of sleep I had left.”
For all its turmoil, at its core there’s a kind of rest, as when a dog circles round and round on its bed before settling. Sleepless doesn’t have a proposition as such, but I come back to this idea of inhabiting. This is a book about dwelling, being grounded, as much as it is about sleep. One of its pages is given over to photographs of hotel rooms around the world that Darrieussecq has stayed (not necessarily slept) in. When she arrives at a room in Haiti during a storm, “the tiles on the bungalow floor are covered in a centimetre of water, but the beds, like boats, are dry”. The bed as a boat on a sea – an image that’s accompanied me through many wired nights. In her perpetual wakefulness Darrieussecq is hyper-aware of the space afforded to each of us on this planet (all species, not just humans), and of settling on whatever suffices for a bed – that small piece of the Earth we might call our own.
Samantha Harvey is the author of The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
• Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston, is published by Fitzcarraldo (£13.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
