Donald Trump triggered it in the US. Brexit induced it in the UK. Insomnia. Marie Darrieussecq in Sleepless, translated from French by Penny Hueston (Fitzcarraldo, 257pp, £12.99), offers an absorbing account of what happens when troubles, big and small, put paid to our sleep. She points out that the most famous opening line in 20th century French literature – “For a long time I used to go to bed early” – is a prelude to failure as the young Marcel Proust confesses that a half an hour later, he wakes up, unable to sleep.
Darrieussecq first came to attention in the English-speaking world more than 20 years ago for her highly regarded Pig Tales (1998), which is precisely around the period when she stopped sleeping normally after the birth of her first child. Long a preferred instrument of torture for oppressive regimes, sleep deprivation can drive its sufferers to extremes. Darrieussecq has an extended roll call of the medicinal casualties of sleeplessness, artists who died not so much in their sleep as in the hope of sleep: Prince, Jimi Hendrix, Judy Garland. She describes her own anxious relationship with the balm of the sleeping pill and the terrors of barbiturate addiction.
Alcohol, yoga, sleep therapy, are variously pressed into service over the two decades to woo back sleep, but to no avail. Darrieussecq’s formidable erudition and corrosive wit allow her to move effortlessly from Dante’s Divine Comedy described as “nothing more than a long negotiation between sudden sleeps and unforgiving insomnia” to the sleepless misery of homelessness.
Capitalism’s 24/7 war on sleep in the battle for our attention and the doom-scrolling compulsiveness of our digital habits bode ill for the future of rest. Sleepless is an eloquent reminder of why we are right to lose sleep over the prospect of losing it, indefinitely.
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The monsters that emerge from the sleep of reason crowd the pages of Gerda Blees’s We Are Light, translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchinson (World Editions, 229pp, £13.99). When Elisabeth dies of malnutrition in the Sound and Love Commune, her sister, Melodie, and a couple, Muriel and Petrus, are taken into police custody on suspicion of failing to help a person in danger.
Blees tells the story of Elisabeth’s demise from a wide range of perspectives, which includes everyone and everything from parents and neighbours to a cello, two cigarettes and a pair of goat-wool socks. The voices of human and non-human actors try to piece together the circumstances of this intimate tragedy. Blees is particularly adept at capturing the delusional narcissism of Melodie – the unspoken leader of the commune – who employs a mixture of soft-soap therapy talk and low-grade emotional bullying to rigidly control the behaviours of the other members of the group.
During the nine-day process of “light nutrition” (refusing all food, with fatal consequences for Elisabeth), Melodie bamboozles her housemates with the self-serving rhetoric of the wellness industry to quell their doubts and disarm their criticisms. Blees relentlessly tracks the gradual lapse into unreason, the surrender to corrosive half-truths, that draw the vulnerable members of the commune to the destructive fictions of conspiracy mongers and quacks.
The voice of Elisabeth’s body tells us that “there are cleverer, more subtle ways of getting someone to do something than by physical force, more effective ways to compel a person to fight against their bodily impulses”. This powerful and unsettling tale – winner of the Dutch booksellers prize – shows us what mere words can do, both to destroy lives and to spell out in forensic detail the mechanisms of that destructiveness.
Physical force, on the other hand, is never far from the lives and experiences of the characters in Khadija Marouazi’s History of Ash (Hoopoe, 215pp, £12.99), translated from Arabic by Alexander E Elison. In this complex and harrowing account, the Moroccan novelist describes the brutal treatment of dissidents by the state, particularly apparent in the 1970s and 1980s during the reign of King Hassan II.
Mouline and Lelia, male and female political activists, are brutally tortured by the Moroccan secret police before disappearing into the endless night of the prison system. It is prison experience, in particular, that is the focus of Marouazi’s tale as she charts the debilitating consequences of long-term confinement in inhumane conditions. As she notes: “Prison is a place that each part of the body might come out of with nothing to hold them together.”
Even solidarity begins to falter as the years behind bars causes the political prisoners to splinter into fractious and mutually antagonistic groups. The question is increasingly asked as to whether “the toll of a lifetime behind bars” is an exorbitant price to pay for a handful of ideas”.
But it is the women activists who have to deal with multiple forms of oppression, both within and without the prison walls. They are frequently shunned by their families who find the idea of a woman in prison unconscionable. Outside prison, initially welcomed as comrades, they quickly find themselves relegated to the back rooms of domestic captivity. Leila, as someone who resists the culture of submission, soon finds herself an object of suspicion and dislike. She eventually finds solace in the support and solidarity of other women, sensitive to her familiar plight.
History of Ash is a brave book, not only for exposing the unspeakable past cruelties of the Moroccan regime, but for articulating the self-doubts and vulnerabilities of individuals or groups who set themselves up in opposition to the overwhelming fact of official violence. Marouazi is an eloquent and provocative witness to what humans have to endure and to what they should not have to tolerate.
Witness of a different order is at play in Carolina Schutti’s Without Waking Up, translated from German by Deirdre McMahon (Bullaun Press, 138pp, €14). Maja, orphaned at an early age and entrusted into the care of an aunt by her father, documents a world where duty is paramount and love scarce. The aunt is not so much the wicked stepmother as the watchful guardian, in thrall to duty and silence.
The novel, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2015, follows Maja’s gradual awakening to a wider world of emotion and possibility through her friendship with her schoolmate, Fini, an older neighbour, Marek, and her relationship with Erich and his friend, Bert. The dream from which Maja refuses to awake is the life that Maja might have had, were her Belorussian mother still alive. The birth of a daughter, Anja, intensifies the sense of loss and Maja sets off on a journey to bring them both back to the mother’s land.
It is the spectre of the absent mother’s tongue that particularly troubles Maja: “I lost my language along with my mother: the falling-sleep phrases, the comforting phrases, this cradle-rocking of words, our language island where the was just enough room for the two of us.” The theme of “language island” is particularly appropriate as this translation of the Austrian novelist’s prize-winning work is by a publishing house, Bullaun Press, based in Ireland, and wholly devoted to publishing works in translation. Waking up to what we lose when we lose a language and a culture is a personal tragedy for Maja but a spur to a new generation of translation publishers who want to recover the compelling diversity of the world’s languages and literatures.
Martin Hill’s unique tragedy is that Daniel Radcliffe not Martin got to play the main role in the Harry Potter movies. David Foenkinos in Second Best, translated from French by Megan Jones (Gallic Books, 215pp, £12.99), imagines a scene where two actors out of hundreds remain to be auditioned for the part of Harry Potter, and he describes the life of the one not picked. Second Best is about a particular kind of failure, not doomed hopelessness where nothing works from the get go, but where you almost get there, the prize tantalisingly close. The drama of not being the chosen one is being never allowed to forget.
Martin’s childhood and teenage years are blighted by the remorseless appearance of seven novels and eight films from the Rowling stable, each one a cruel reminder of what might have been. As the narrator notes early on in the novel: “Fate is always thought to be a positive force, propelling us towards a magical future. Surprisingly, its negative side is very rarely mentioned, as though fate has entrusted the management of its brand image to a PR genius.”
Second Best is a witty and heartfelt portrait of what happens when luck does not go your way. It also shows, more generally, what happens when a society is subject to the endless Instagram audition, the tyranny of the sight of other people’s happiness. Though Foenkinos is partial to the occasional, passing, platitude (“At the start of a relationship, the beloved is a Russian novel: long, deep and wild”), his sensitive and empathetic handling of the theme of the also-ran is as instructive as it is entertaining.
