A genre of memoir currently in vogue involves entwining the author’s personal story with the cultural history of a given phenomenon, so that each may illuminate the other. Mellow introspection and anecdotal whimsy are spliced with tidbits of cultural criticism; the prose is meandering and associative rather than linearly expository.
This format can feel a little gimmicky, but in the case of Marina Benjamin’s Insomnia it is apt: the book’s digressive expansiveness and collage-like structure evoke the feeling of lying in bed at night with your thoughts racing –
the freewheeling, seemingly autonomous tripping through utter banality, the night-time regurgitation of daytime crud… that moves like an arm-linked chain of cancan dancers through a demi-wakefulness that exists beyond any conscious control.
A passage on stimulants winds its way back to the political economy of the colonial-era sugar trade; a meditation on the isolation of the insomniac prompts a series of reflections on Robinson Crusoe; a segment on psychoanalytical dream theories examines interpretations of dreams experienced by people living under dictatorships.
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