I am not sleeping enough. I haven't been sleeping enough for weeks. Months, really, at this point. I have written no poems since the first week of June. I am barely managing to write about books or movies. Several pleasant things have happened this week and yet I feel exhausted to the point of nonexistence: I am having trouble thinking about anything, except that I don't have the option of turning my brain off, either. I feel like I am scraping thinner and thinner and I haven't broken in the last year and a half, so chances are I won't now, but the idea of just keeping on in this state is agonizing. I suppose this is the mindset in which Beckett plays take place. Does anyone want to be in a Beckett play, or does it just happen to them? I thought once I'd gotten Christopher Fry.
Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934) not only does not fall apart in its second half, it winds up to a firecracker finish of prose poetry and polyphony and some of the best timing I've seen in a novel lately. David who lent it to me warned me that it "has a kick like a mule," but he did not warn me that I would close the book just smiling in pleasure at the skill of the language. It reminds me oddly of Phyllis Gotlieb's Why Should I Have All the Grief? (1969), her only non-genre novel; both are deeply Jewish and vividly, unconventionally written. I don't know if there is any link between them. For purposes of this post, I don't know if it matters. (Don Marquis, I know she loved.) Read both! But I've evangelized more about Gotlieb over the years, so take from this post an unambiguous recommendation for Henry Roth. I know nothing about his later novels; they were published either at the very end of his life or posthumously and not all the editing was done by the author. Call It Sleep, though, is terrific.
I have to go back to trying to fall asleep. Tomorrow morning, the dentist.
Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934) not only does not fall apart in its second half, it winds up to a firecracker finish of prose poetry and polyphony and some of the best timing I've seen in a novel lately. David who lent it to me warned me that it "has a kick like a mule," but he did not warn me that I would close the book just smiling in pleasure at the skill of the language. It reminds me oddly of Phyllis Gotlieb's Why Should I Have All the Grief? (1969), her only non-genre novel; both are deeply Jewish and vividly, unconventionally written. I don't know if there is any link between them. For purposes of this post, I don't know if it matters. (Don Marquis, I know she loved.) Read both! But I've evangelized more about Gotlieb over the years, so take from this post an unambiguous recommendation for Henry Roth. I know nothing about his later novels; they were published either at the very end of his life or posthumously and not all the editing was done by the author. Call It Sleep, though, is terrific.
I have to go back to trying to fall asleep. Tomorrow morning, the dentist.
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