Ailsa Ross Recommends Byung-Chul Han, Annabel Abbs-Streets, Samantha Harvey, and More
Shakespeare called sleep “nature’s soft nurse.” But who is caring for the insomniac who has forgotten how to sleep? Some kind of cruel night minder? How nice it must be to simply get into bed and wake up rested eight or so hours later. The best the insomniac can hope for is to surrender to their fate, and accept knowing the night’s texture all too well. Yes, the best one can hope for is to be a little like Christiane Ritter, an Austrian housewife who, in the 1930s, joined her husband for a season on the Arctic island of Svalbard and who, after much lamenting, came to love the endless darkness and cold that kept her lying in her bunk for endless hours. She felt transcendent, watching the moon from inside her sleeping bag.Article continues after advertisement
Of course, such a peaceful experience can seem impossible when one’s eyes and bones and skull ache deeply during another night spent in the torture chamber (aka the bed), yet surrendering to fate really is all there is. Or that’s what the amor fati-loving protagonist in my debut novel Hovel decides, as she takes on increasingly absurd projects in order to accept her life in a dishevelled mountain town. I started writing it after reading a cutting, and very funny, old review of Eat Pray Love by Rachel Cusk in The Guardian. It’s fair to say that Cusk did not love Eat Pray Love. She imagined reading a less self-centered book, one where Elizabeth Gilbert’s bathroom floor epiphany to divorce her husband “might have led her not to break the life she had but to accept it, to exercise her capacity for devotion right there.” In my novel, the narrator tries to accept her life and accept her capacity for devotion right where she is. So, no trips to Bali or Rome. Just a woman doing small and quiet, private things, in the place where she already lives, with the husband she already has. Does trying to smell like a dog make her see the world anew? Does pissing in the woods? You’ll have to read Hovel to find out. Or just read the excellent books below.
