Tolton

A real authentic gem of a book. A work of immense compassion and understanding for the human being. Oddly (post-) structualist. Few characters in fiction have moved me as much as Zacharias Lichter has. Călinescu writes with love: you see tenderness in every sentence.

Thomas Merton wrote once something along the lines that writing for oneself is writing for no one. Something to that effect. Sleepless Nights is a book for no one. What sets out to be a meditation on memory and life comes together as a series of unrelated and poorly composed portraits that flatten their subjects in a kind of catty, superficial way, albeit very pretty at times. You find little beneath a surface of mundane observations on character and circumstance. Though there are brief digressions about her parents and her past which are inspired, have heart. But when she writes about these figures from her past, the impression given from her is an apathetic distance. A juvenile sort of cynicism about relationships and love and ideas hangs over her depictions. It's boring and lacks tenderness or compassion.

Hardwick's purple montage approach to sentences takes one at first, but quickly loses its novelty once one realizes the string of objects she chooses could be replaced with anything, given they fit the general cadence and rhythm of the sentense. It is a short, dull book I found myself wanting to skip through despite the sections being brief.

After having seen both film adaptations of the novel, I figured it'd be worth a read. The central metaphor of an imagined past in the present, living through memories that never were, as ghosts haunting and draining life from the dream flaneur, shows so well an aspect of depression I haven't seen explored much in media. There are few things more tempting than giving hours of your life to fantasies satisfying an impossible desire: to have dinner with someone no longer here. Desire is fulfilled without movement, without even needing to leave bed. It's an act that takes more than it gives.

The book doesn't offer much past this and, at least as a translation, is the worst iteration of the story. It might as well have been a screenplay, seeing as Obayashi's The Discarnates re-creates the book beat for beat, with dialog being picked directly out of the book. Yamada (or Lammers) doesn't have the literary chops to lean into what language affords a story over film. Action follows action without space or interiority. The twist at the end is more confounding than affecting, and leaves the story worse off.

If you've found the book through All of Us Strangers, just watch the Obayashi adaptation. You're not missing much.