Samantha Harvey at The Guardian:
“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.
more here.