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A review by scribepub
Insomnia by Marina Benjamin
Every insomniac knows how sleeplessness warps and deforms reality. Marina Benjamin anatomises its endless nights and red-eyed mornings, finding a sublime language for this strange state of lack. Her writing is often reminiscent of Anne Carson: beautiful, jagged and precise.
Olivia Laing, Author of The Lonely City
An exquisite meditation on time, the dark hours, and the complexities of longtime love, Insomnia is a poetic journey into the wide-awake, generous, exciting mind of Marina Benjamin. I couldn't put it down, and my own inner world is richer for it.
Dani Shapiro, Author of Hourglass
A sublime view of the treasures and torments to be found in wakefulness. Entertaining and existential, the brightest star in this erudite, nocturnal reverie in search of lost sleep, is the beauty of the writing itself.
Deborah Levy, Author of Hot Milk
Marina Benjamin is the Scheherazade of sleeplessness, spinning tale upon tale, insight upon insight, in frayed and astonishing and finally ecstatic loops.
Francis Spufford, Author of Golden Hill
Benjamin writes beautifully. This is a graceful rumination on the ‘wicked kind of trespass’ that is insomnia, a work cogent and allusive as a lucid dream, a palimpsest of insights to dip into, day or night.
Anna Funder, Author of Stasiland and All That I Am
Insomnia reads with the surreal and suspended cadence of those lonely hours in the night that only the sleep-less experience. It is, therefore, a kind and intimate companion to our meandering, agitated, non-knowing, spiritually naked thoughts at such hours. Keep it by your bedside lamp!
Sarah Wilson, Author of First, We Make the Beast Beautiful
Insomnia is not so much a lament for lost oblivion as a defiant hymn to the wild isle of Insomnia.
Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald
It’s a book about insomnia’s existential and somatic qualities … Insomnia is a striking reminder of how strange we remain to ourselves. We spend a third of our lives in sleep, but our relationship with that condition is, as Benjamin describes it, “perverse” and “fundamentally embattled”. Read this at night at your own peril.
The Saturday Paper
[Insomnia is] a memoir in roving fragments that mirror the workings of a sleepless mind.
Lilly Dancyger, Vulture
A darkly thrilling beauty of a book … Benjamin’s talent is Arachne-like. The materials she integrates are eclectic, and the resulting constructed web of her thoughts is architecturally robust and resplendent with dazzling prose.
Australian Book Review, Tali Lavi
A short, ludic book about long white nights ... [Benjamin] writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don’t want to be ... Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness.
The New Yorker
Velvety ruminations on night wakefulness ... Benjamin’s mind works like a wide-roving trawler that rakes an area repeatedly before moving on to adjacent territory ... Insomnia turns out to be somewhat of a celebration of sleeplessness as well as a lament ... and is filled with memorable images.
Heller McAlpin, NPR
A work that takes its structure from the insomniac’s mind, flitting restlessly between ideas to build what may be described as a philosophical portrait of sleeplessness ... This strange, entrancing book is in many ways a love letter, albeit one to a particularly irritating lover. Benjamin wants, she writes, “to flip disruption and affliction into opportunity, and puncture the darkness with stabs of light”.
Jane McCredie, Weekend Australian
Olivia Laing, Author of The Lonely City
An exquisite meditation on time, the dark hours, and the complexities of longtime love, Insomnia is a poetic journey into the wide-awake, generous, exciting mind of Marina Benjamin. I couldn't put it down, and my own inner world is richer for it.
Dani Shapiro, Author of Hourglass
A sublime view of the treasures and torments to be found in wakefulness. Entertaining and existential, the brightest star in this erudite, nocturnal reverie in search of lost sleep, is the beauty of the writing itself.
Deborah Levy, Author of Hot Milk
Marina Benjamin is the Scheherazade of sleeplessness, spinning tale upon tale, insight upon insight, in frayed and astonishing and finally ecstatic loops.
Francis Spufford, Author of Golden Hill
Benjamin writes beautifully. This is a graceful rumination on the ‘wicked kind of trespass’ that is insomnia, a work cogent and allusive as a lucid dream, a palimpsest of insights to dip into, day or night.
Anna Funder, Author of Stasiland and All That I Am
Insomnia reads with the surreal and suspended cadence of those lonely hours in the night that only the sleep-less experience. It is, therefore, a kind and intimate companion to our meandering, agitated, non-knowing, spiritually naked thoughts at such hours. Keep it by your bedside lamp!
Sarah Wilson, Author of First, We Make the Beast Beautiful
Insomnia is not so much a lament for lost oblivion as a defiant hymn to the wild isle of Insomnia.
Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald
It’s a book about insomnia’s existential and somatic qualities … Insomnia is a striking reminder of how strange we remain to ourselves. We spend a third of our lives in sleep, but our relationship with that condition is, as Benjamin describes it, “perverse” and “fundamentally embattled”. Read this at night at your own peril.
The Saturday Paper
[Insomnia is] a memoir in roving fragments that mirror the workings of a sleepless mind.
Lilly Dancyger, Vulture
A darkly thrilling beauty of a book … Benjamin’s talent is Arachne-like. The materials she integrates are eclectic, and the resulting constructed web of her thoughts is architecturally robust and resplendent with dazzling prose.
Australian Book Review, Tali Lavi
A short, ludic book about long white nights ... [Benjamin] writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don’t want to be ... Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness.
The New Yorker
Velvety ruminations on night wakefulness ... Benjamin’s mind works like a wide-roving trawler that rakes an area repeatedly before moving on to adjacent territory ... Insomnia turns out to be somewhat of a celebration of sleeplessness as well as a lament ... and is filled with memorable images.
Heller McAlpin, NPR
A work that takes its structure from the insomniac’s mind, flitting restlessly between ideas to build what may be described as a philosophical portrait of sleeplessness ... This strange, entrancing book is in many ways a love letter, albeit one to a particularly irritating lover. Benjamin wants, she writes, “to flip disruption and affliction into opportunity, and puncture the darkness with stabs of light”.
Jane McCredie, Weekend Australian