You could try to summarize the issue with statistics: So many people in the UK, the EU or anywhere else have sleep problems.

One could also, like Marina Benjamin in her book "Insomnia", process it historically, philosophically and artistically in the hope of gaining new insights.

One could cobble together a service primer and offer the usual advice: warm milk, premium pillows, stress reduction, no online trips before bed.

You could also drop all of that and write an erratic memoir that gives the subject an appropriate structure.

The English writer Samantha Harvey chose this path.

Her book "The Year Without Sleep" sounds like an autobiographical card box in which everything belongs together and yet is disparate,

Kai Spanke

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Harvey tells many anecdotes, she describes why her mother's dog once belonged to her father and died in agony, how she tries to find her way to sleep and what thoughts rush through her head while doing so, how she once took ecstasy and then one Busch stared at.

On top of that, she switches the perspective between the first and third person.

This confusion appears, a supposed contradiction, well composed, even disciplined.

The author interlocks content and presentation for good reason: "A life without sleep, in which one day flows into the next, loses all form."

Form and content fickleness

Again and again, the loss of form becomes the subject of reflection, for example when Harvey imagines the process of decomposition of her cousin, who died at a young age: "On your fourth or fifth day of death you start to stink and you become a dynamic, moving mass.

Methane, exhalations, swellings, metamorphoses, your tongue slips out of your mouth, liquids in your nose, intestines out of your rectum.” The author contrasts such creaturely metamorphoses with reflections on what is always the same.

For example, lying awake, she wonders why a striking number of television programs have the word "secret" in the title: "The Secret Life of Dogs" or "The Secret History of Ireland".

Strange, because a dog doesn't bother to hide its everyday life from us.

Maybe we know little about him

In order to make the seriousness of the situation clear, a note follows very early on: “If I don't sleep, which is very often the case, I don't sleep at all.

I'm less of a bad sleeper now than a non-sleeper.” As such, nights when Harvey sleeps badly are good nights because she sleeps at all.

And always the fear of insomnia leads to insomnia.

"A vicious circle of Euclidean perfection." Anyone who is not familiar with this can hardly understand it: the patient seems above all neurotic to her doctor, and the louder she, the patient, complains, the more convincing she appears in her role as a psychological one, which she did not choose herself problem case.

As soon as she realizes that she is not being taken very seriously, she becomes more vehement, which the doctor sees as confirmation of the initial suspicion.

Harvey's fickleness in form and content makes for refreshing reading.

Since it is repeatedly about the writing process, she tries out different metaphors, formulates the next thought within one thought and asks herself what kind of effects the Pirahã spoken by the indigenous population of the same name has on self-perception, because this language has no subordinate clauses.

As soon as a short story finds its way into the memoir, the patchwork quilt woven by Harvey frays a bit.

It's about a man who empties an ATM, loses his wedding ring in the process and, afraid of his obnoxious wife, returns to the scene of the crime to start looking.

That's one register too many.

In fact, one or the other statistic would have been more interesting instead.

Samantha Harvey: "The Year Without Sleep".

Translated from the English by Julia Wolf.

Hanser Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2022. 176 p., hardcover, €23.