Bernard-Henri Lévy is running on fumes. Plus ça change. “I slept as always last night, a few hours, with chemistry compelling me to sleep,” the Parisian public intellectual tells me when we speak on the phone. “I miss the process of sleep, the process of getting awake, all parts of the ceremony I miss. But insomnia has given me more than it has taken. More time, certainly more work, more vigilance; I’m awake.”
“Maybe I would sleep better if I was British,” Lévy says
His latest book, Nuit Blanche, which has yet to be translated into English, is a runaway bestseller in France, where it was released in January. It is an ode to insomnia, a meditation and a reflection upon the experience and the meaning of sleeplessness, from which the 76-year-old has suffered for decades.
Written with the intimate tone of a confidant, it takes the reader from his extensive library, which he organises and reorganises during dark hours of wakefulness, to his bedroom, where we encounter his wife and the “pharmacie de nuit” that allows him to snatch at least four hours of medicated unconsciousness.
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