“Tell me, is it true that a bad artist suffers as greatly as a good one? There were many performers at the Hotel Schuyler, but they gave no hint of suffering from the failure of their art. Perhaps the art had changed its name and came to their minds as something else – employment. ”- Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless NightsSleepless Nights is one of those -far too rare- works of literature which unmercifully teases its audience with its non-normative, plotless, collage-like, amorphous storytelling.

If this book were a work of art on canvas, it would be a collage by Romare Bearden -- its subjects layered in thick coats of paint, scraps of newspaper, bits of textured fabric, and torn photographs (particularly of eyes and ears). Or maybe it would be a quilt. Here is a book unlike any that I've ever read before. No real story with plot, no timeline. It's more like reading random pages torn from a journal or sitting at a kitchen table flipping through pages of a friend's scrapbook in no particu...

[3.5] Although only 128 pages, this "novel" took me almost a month to finish. It reads like a distilled writer’s notebook - exquisitely rendered thoughts, character studies and impressions written down for use in a novel or memoir. The prose is rich and lovely but it felt aimless.

Sleepless Nights is the literary equivalent of a Gryphon: it has the head of a memoir, the body of a novel and the tail of an epistle. The constructs of what constitutes a novel do not apply. Trying to explain Hardwick's style, her talent, is like trying to answer the question "How long is a piece of string?" For example, here are two sentences taken from the last page of the novel:Mother, the reading glasses and the assignation near the clammy faces, so gray, of the intense church ladies. And t...

Chadwick had already been hovering over my To-Read list, but I finally picked this one when I read a reference to her in one of Ilse’s reviews. As I have recently read a book of essays, by Lydia Davis, I opted to pick one of Chadwick’s fictional works.I loved the beginning and the overall premise. The memory of her life presented as the facing, in the current moment, of a collection of cans – cans which can be picked, examined, opened, or, undisturbed, be put back on the shelf. For her suggestio...

A respectful three stars. Some really strong moments but overall it felt too privileged, a sense that grew and grew until it overwhelmed my appreciation of the strong, smart sentences, like they were too tasteful. As with Speedboat, which I read before this and very much preferred, too much of a good thing became -- by about three-fourths through -- not enough for me. A great few pages about Billie Holiday but that section seemed like the climax of my interest and the rest went downhill. Glad I

There was something about the tone of this book that kept me from really gettting involved in it. There is a line where you know that the characters she is speaking of are not fictional, so it is more like a memoir. Yet she is not in it, so she just stays out of it, a narrator that is not involved really, not emotionally. At the same time she is very cold about everyone she speaks of, almost treating them as if they were caricatures. I do not know if this was the best book to start reading hardw...

a review of sorts, for this memoir of sorts.• i often look at my past with enormous longing and a slight touch of pride. but it's seldom that I read something which engulfs me into such a wondrous melancholia that I find myself being evoked with every word my eyes embrace. i could only paint for you a picturesque view of what my inner feelings must have looked like while reading this magnificently written stream of consciousness - it would be like listening to jazz on those cold sleepless nights...

A book I liked even as I sensed that I wasn’t quite grasping it, that it was slipping through my fingers. A fragmentary narrative of the difficult-to-categorise variety. Feels very 21st century somehow (read this instead of the hot hyped novels of February 2021). Occasionally a sentence would glint out at me like a jewel catching the light. Hardwick’s writing about Billie Holiday, especially, has stuck with me. Reminded me of a clutch of writers who all happen to be women, though I didn’t realis...

Proust up all night in her rent-controlled New York City apartment, counting the passing taxis while waiting for the rumble of the garbage trucks that signal the first stirrings of dawn, running low on cigarettes while rereading old letters, slipping entire vanished worlds snugly inside a slim volume of 128 pages.

I heard the sounds of sorrow and delight,The manifold, soft chimes,That fill the haunted chambers of the Night,Like some old poet’s rhymes.~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hymn to the Night A book written in the form of life. So concluded Geoffrey O'Brien in the brilliant introduction to this distinguishing literary feat. To narrow down that observation a bit, I’ll say that this is a book written in the form of ‘Sleepless Nights’. You know the kind of nights that opens up the reluctantly closed do...

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.-Italo Calvino in an interview with The Paris ReviewMemory is a sly kitten, darting to and fro through the living room of our mind, appearing in flashes here then there, never in an orderly fashion and rarely giving us a perfect still-frame to assess all the details. Elizabeth Hardwick’s astounding ‘novel’—or should modern times brand it with the now-popular ‘creative non-fiction’ label—Sleepless Nights is a brilliant blending

I have a quote from Joan Didion in my goodreads quote collection. It goes like this: I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. There's also a quote in the collection from Grace Paley: There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.I feel that what Elizabeth Hardwick is doing in Sleepless Nights is a combination of both those approaches. She writes as if the page is where her thinking happens and yet her...

So this is some breathtakingly good writing. Distilled, focused and filled with some of the most unexpectedly perfect analogies/metaphors/similes I have read. Aubrey, Brian and Garima have written wonderful reviews already, and there is much out there in the WWW to give you more details about this slim little novel. However, I find the best way to decide whether or not I want to read someone is to have a sampler, a taster. So, with that in mind... Read. Listen. "Photographs of marriage. records

4.5 starsThis is a sort of autobiographical fiction: written in 1979 when Hardwick was 63. It is a series of vignettes linked together (sometimes very tenuously) by the author. It is a memoir, novel, letter, essay and as one reviewer says: a poetic chronicle. It is inventive and perceptive. There is originality and a complete lack of plot, more like a piece of music than a novel. Elizabeth, the protagonist of the novel is hardly seen. The fragmentary nature of the novel and the steady narrative

The missing link between Sebald and the Cheever diaries - beautifully observed vignettes (some of the descriptions are extraordinary) that ebb and flow into something of a memoirish novel, complete with subplots. I would add in David Markson as well. Hardwick is very well-read, and the book brims with quotes and readerly observations. Some sections are weaker than others and I ran out of steam a bit toward the end, but there is too much strength here (especially in Part 5 with Alex) to ignore.

Elizabeth Hardwick’s short memoir/novel has pages about Billie Holiday, and jazz clubs, and more pages on some American Communists, and yes, we’re in New York, which is never ever dull, and plus, all my GR friends adore it – so, in the words of one beloved tv personality, what could possibly go wrong? But the prose so purple the Pope would think twice about wearing it and the mood is so doggedly gloomy that by page 50 I needed a ventilator. I slept with Alex three times and remember each one pe...

This is the sort of book that I would like to write one day. While I do enjoy works of great length, this is due more to my own mulling processes than any real dislike of shorter pieces. I prefer to read, ponder, read, ponder some more, allowing subconscious faculties to leisurely sample the intake over the course of days; when the book has finally ended and the review awaits, much of the thoughts are there to meet them. What I remember of the days before, I use; what I don't was fit to be filte...

The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives One of the consolations that literature provides is a sense of belonging, for those who may lack it in the real world. I've been able to reason to myself that my eccentricities are not really odd, but it is truly gratifying to find them in others. To feel social and affable toward others, even if they are dead. This sense of belonging is the kind of relationship, when care

Sentences to die for; sublime stuff from a supreme, often uncanny intellect. 'In her white bedroom, next to the pure white bed that seemed to promise a rest under a mist of snowflakes, there was the wedding photograph of her parents, smiling down from a silver frame studded with amethysts. Mostly, Marie lived with her own curiously compelling deprivation, like a contemplative without the athletic vigor required for the consumption of cars, flowers and pictures, winter houses and summer houses, p...