From telegraph.co.uk
In this peculiar book, Marie Darrieussecq details her own battles with sleep deprivation – and those of other writers from Ovid to Hemingway
Insomniacs, whom the French author Marie Darrieussecq, with weary irony, calls “those champions of fatigue”, will try anything to drop off: earplugs, eyeshades, herbal teas, lime-blossom essence on the pillows. “I do a few Pilates stretches,” she writes in Sleepless, “with the same little inflatable ball that I also take with me when I travel.” Her bedsheets must be white, never patterned. For 30 years, she has been “running with barbiturates” and the like – Lexomil, Imovane, Atarax, Temesta, Donormyl. Cannabis didn’t work as “I felt wasted all day”. She drew the line at resorting to a morphine suppository.
Night after night, Darrieussecq wakes at 4.30am: too early to get up, “too late to start living”. The digestion is upset, and one seems to see double. Cold, heat, pain – all are heightened. “Meaning is erased,” says Darrieussecq, “time is compressed.” Insomnia is like pushing a wheelbarrow uphill, in which squats a huge toad. “It’s so heavy, and its body gets bigger as the night goes on.” No wonder sleep deprivation is a torture technique, deployed still at Guantanamo Bay. Chronic insomnia attacks the short-term memory; exhaustion engenders a sort of idiocy. The walls of the bedroom seem to pulsate; worries crash upon you like waves. I should know: I’m an insomniac myself.
Darrieussecq got herself hooked up to monitors in a lab, where the technicians found that she kept waking up 20 times an hour, a state known as “hypervigilance”. It turns out that writers are often prone to this – and, as Sleepless recounts, go on about it as if it implied some superiority. “I think insomnia is a path towards what I would call a higher intelligence,” said Marguerite Duras, in a boast worthy of Sontag or Woolf. The latter had to be whacked with a wet towel after taking too much Veronal, a white crystalline hypnotic. She was advised instead to drink milk and stop writing. Proust, who said of his insomnia, “I’m living in a sort of death punctuated by brief awakenings”, needed absolute silence. His walls were lined with cork, and he rented apartments above and below his own to keep them footstep-free.
Whether or not sleeplessness grants visionary powers, there’s certainly a link with alcoholism. The insomniacal Hemingway and Faulkner drank a bottle of whisky a day. Jean Rhys required two bottles of wine; Lawrence Durrell needed four or five pints – also of wine. As for Darrieussecq: “I’m incapable of falling asleep without my red wine.” (Surely the litre of coffee she takes each evening can’t help; I daren’t touch even decaf beyond mid-afternoon.)
“The world is divided,” we are told, “into those who can sleep and those who can’t.” This seems as sound a definition as any. Insomniacs often claim they’ve gained six or seven years of wakefulness by not wasting time slumbering – but it’s a horrible sort of wakefulness, an unproductive prickly grogginess, and I always envied Churchill, who had a bed in his office for afternoon naps. He claimed his snoozes “won the war”. Pepys, Darrieussecq tells us, slept through the Great Fire of London: “His servant had to shake him to get him out of bed.” People who sleep soundly will often say, annoyingly, “I have a clear conscience”, as if the insomniac were, like Macbeth, guilty of heinous crime and sin.
The plain fact is, as Darrieussecq puts it, that “nothing prevents the insomniac from not sleeping” – not hot milk, immersion in an icy bath, acupuncture, meditation, fasting, or even heavy blankets filled with glass beads. “The anti-insomnia blanket prevented me from sleeping,” she says, concluding that every trick is generally hopeless.
Sleepless is a peculiar book, though it captures the skittering, jittery mood of an insomniac’s “white forgetfulness”, of what it’s like to be simultaneously over-stimulated and over-stretched. Darrieussecq is known for her disconcerting approach – her first novel Truismes (1996), which sold a million copies, concerned a woman who turns into a pig – and true to form, there are many digressions here. Yet they often fail to add up: paragraphs about Africa, Japan, Chernobyl, extinct animals, deforestation, pangolins, hotel rooms, complete with smudgy snapshots. The net effect of all these jottings and footnotes? I was soon dead to the world.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sleepless-by-marie-darrieussecq-review/
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