The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (43 page)

The novel is divided into six parts, each representing the various stages of sleep, and follows four loosely connected characters who each have a different issue with sleep. Sarah is a narcoleptic whose dreams are so vivid that she can’t tell the difference between them and real life. Terry, a budding film critic, sleeps a minimum of fourteen hours a day because he is addicted to dreams of such “near-paradisal loveliness.” Gregory, Sarah’s boyfriend, becomes a psychiatrist at a sleep clinic and begins self-experimenting with sleeplessness for scientific purposes, believing it to be a disease that must be conquered. Robert—at first seemingly the most normal of the four—becomes so obsessed with Sarah that he puts himself through a dramatic transformation in order to inveigle his way into her life, and bed. With lustrous technical detail sure to fascinate the sleep deprived, this novel may offer some ideas for practical cures as well.

The novel to reach for in those restless hours, on the other hand, is
The Book of Disquiet
, the plotless journal of Bernardo Soares, assistant accountant at Vasques and Co. on the Rua dos Douradores—a job “about as demanding as an afternoon nap.” Soares both despairs and celebrates the monotony of his humdrum life because he recognizes that everything he thinks and feels exists only as a “negation of and flight from” his job. And what thoughts and feelings they are! Because Soares, a man in possession of a face so bland that
it causes him terrible dismay when he sees it in an office photograph, is a dreamer, his attention always divided by what is actually going on and the flights of fancy in his head.

For his disappointment in himself, his dreaminess, his constantly breaking heart, it’s impossible not to fall in love with Soares. Quiet, unobtrusive, plaintive, constantly drowsy, a man who, though prone to nostalgia and bouts of desolation, is not immune to joy, he is the perfect nighttime companion. Pondering whether life is in fact “the waking insomnia of [our] dreams,” Soares thinks a lot about sleep—in fact, he barely discriminates between sleeping and wakefulness.

Besides all this, nowhere in literature are the rhythms of prose more attuned to the lumbering gait of the sleepless hours. If your eyelids start to droop as you read, Soares won’t mind. You can pick up your conversation with him, wherever you left off, tomorrow night.

See also:
Depression, general
•
Exhaustion
•
Irritability
•
Stress
•
Tired and emotional, being

Wolf Solent

JOHN COWPER POWYS

W
hat have we become? We are a race that sits, by our millions, for hours and days and years on end, gazing in solitary rapture at our screens, lost to a netherworld of negligible reality. Even though we may get up from time to time to eat, sleep, make love, or have a cup of coffee, our computers and smartphones call to us like sirens to come back, interact, update, reload. Like moths drawn to brightness and warmth, we seem unable to resist—even though our eyes are strained, our backs are sore, and our ability to focus is shorn. Sometimes it can seem as if life is more compelling on our screens than off them.

Our cure for this most deplorable of modern ailments is one that will require you to turn your back on life for a few hours more: the mystical, delightfully eccentric John Cowper Powys novel
Wolf Solent
. Set in a West Country already familiar to fans of Thomas Hardy, it is a densely written—but worthwhile—tome. Once you discover JCP, as we shall call him, you’ll
want to chuck your monitor into the nearest Dumpster and go and live out the rest of your days among the birds and the bees.

Wolf Solent
opens with the eponymous hero—an unprepossessing thirty-five-year-old with “goblinish” features—making an escape from London, where he’s been chained to a dull teaching job for ten years. He’s returning to the town of his childhood, where he will reconnect with his own “furtive inner life.” At Wolf’s core is what he calls his “personal mythology,” a sort of mystical place he goes to connect with nature, and from the moment he catches his first whiff, from the train, of the smells of a Dorset spring morning—fresh green shoots, muddy ditches, primroses on a grassy bank—his “real life” begins again. He experiences what he describes as an “intoxicating enlargement of personality” that draws its power from nature itself.

It’s heady stuff—and becomes more so. Soon after Wolf arrives and takes up his new job as researcher for the malicious squire Urquhart, he falls in love with two women at once: the “maddeningly desirable” Gerda, who can imitate the song of a blackbird, and Christie, who shares his passion for books. As Wolf struggles to find a way to love them both, he chases after the bodily sensations that make him feel alive. It’s impossible to resist his raw, ecstatic response to the natural world, and through his eyes you will come to see the animal energy in other people. As a way of rediscovering how to live in the world again—sensually, sexually, with the full engagement of mind and body—it can’t be beaten. And perhaps, like Wolf, being surrounded by all that vegetable efflorescence will soothe your eyes, strengthen your back, and, most crucially, return your fractured brain to full capacity.

See also:
Antisocial, being
•
Concentrate, inability to

The Blackwater Lightship

COLM TÓIBÍN

W
here someone is being irritable, you can be sure there’s another, unexpressed emotion lurking, iceberglike, beneath the surface.

In
The Blackwater Lightship
, Irish writer Colm Tóibín dissects the bitterness and hurt that have set in between three generations of narrator Helen’s family—grandmother Mrs. Devereux,
mother Lily, and daughter Helen—since Helen’s father died many years earlier.

When Helen hears that her brother Declan is dying of AIDS, she has to break the news to their estranged mother, Lily. And when they decide to take Declan to their grandmother’s house in Blackwater, Helen is thrust back into a world she had hoped never to revisit. The knives are out between Lily and Helen before they’ve even arrived, and once they are all shut up in the small, stuffy house, the barbed comments really start flying. Amid their petty accusations and bitter recollections, Declan lies dying, the catalyst of all their arguments, yet the only one not drawn in. Luckily, Declan’s two loyal friends are present—the talkative Larry, the coolly direct Paul—who take the women aside, one by one, and encourage them to vent their feelings. By the end of the novel, all involved have a much clearer understanding of one another’s grievances.

Don’t wait for a crisis to force your irritability to the surface. If you or someone you know is prone to irritation, invite a couple of patient, understanding friends into the mix and talk your icebergs out of the water.

See also:
Anger
•
Dissatisfaction
•
Grumpiness
•
Querulousness

See
:
Constipation
•
Diarrhea
•
Nausea
•
Pain, being in

The Odyssey

HOMER

T
he urge to be constantly on the move is both virtue and folly. While we may gain insight and maturity from constant change and new experiences, we risk polluting our fragile environment and becoming a stone that has gathered no moss. For how do we build a life in multiple places? One needs to commit to a place in order to put down roots (see also: Commitment, fear of), fertilize relationships, and come into flower. To soothe and still your itchy feet, therefore, we recommend a chapter of
The Odyssey
every morning, taken after your shower
and before your breakfast. It will invigorate your circulation and satiate your desire for travel.

Odysseus himself is an inveterate sufferer of itchy feet. King of Ithaca, he left his island home ten years before the action begins, in order to fight the Trojan War. Now he sets off back to Penelope, his wife, and his small but significant sovereignty. But it’ll be another decade before he feels the soil of Ithaca under his well-worn sandals. He is held captive for years by the sea nymph Calypso. The Cyclops Polyphemus keeps him in a cave, along with his men and ovine herd, for some time before Odysseus cunningly blinds his jailer. He is regularly at the mercy of an enraged Poseidon, who sends storms that wash him and his crew up on the island of Circe, where they are all turned temporarily into pigs.