"I have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man," we are told near the beginning of Elizabeth Hardwick's subtle and beautiful new book ["Sleepless Nights"]. "It has come many times and many more it has not. This began early." What follows eludes immediate summary or categorization. "Sleepless Nights" is a novel, but it is a novel in which the subject is memory and in which the "I" whose memories are in question is entirely and deliberately the author: we recognize the events and addresses of Elizabeth Hardwick's life not only from her own earlier work, but from the poems of her husband, the late Robert Lowell…. The result is less a "story about" or "of" a life than a shattered meditation on it, a work as evocative and difficult to place as Claude Lévi-Strauss's "Tristes Tropiques," which it oddly recalls. The author observes of her enigmatic narrative: "It certainly hasn't the drama of: I saw the old, white-bearded frigate master on the dock and signed up for the journey. But after all, 'I' am a woman."
This strikes an interesting note, a balance of Oriental diffidence and exquisite contempt, of irony and direct statement, that exactly expresses the sensibility at work in "Sleepless Nights." "But after all, 'I' am a woman." Triste tropique indeed. (pp. 1, 60)
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