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    The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
    The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
    The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

    Written by Samantha Harvey

    Narrated by Samantha Harvey

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    About this audiobook

    Samantha Harvey’s insomnia arrived, seemingly, from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep
    that rarely comes. She’s tried everything to appease it. Nothing is helping.

    What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet? For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation
    resulted in a raw clarity about life itself.

    Original and profound, The Shapeless Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and
    influence, death and grief, and the will to survive.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 12, 2020
    ISBN9781980097099
    Author

    Samantha Harvey

    Samantha Harvey has published two novels, The Wilderness and All Is Song. She has been short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Guardian First Book Award, and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. She has also won the AMI Literature Award and the Betty Trask Prize. One of The Culture Show's 12 Best New British Novelists, she has contributed to Granta (print and online), has held a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, and is a member of the Academy for the Folio Prize. She lives in Bath, England, and teaches creative writing in the master's program at Bath Spa University.

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    • 5/5
      The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping by Samantha Harvey is an extended meditation about the anxieties of life in general that become amplified when she goes through a year of sleeplessness.If you're seeing comments about "stream of consciousness" writing and don't really like that style, don't let those comments keep you from the book. This isn't truly stream of consciousness. Most of her writing is not internal thoughts unfiltered but rather her thoughts written to convey her feelings to a reader. This means that each small section does have form and the jumps due to associations is less off-putting than in actual stream of consciousness. Harvey does try to convey the way the mind can sabotage attempts at sleep but for the most part stops short of taking us into her unfiltered stream of consciousness.Having clarified that misstatement from so many reviewers (one that makes a certain amount of sense, if a reader views any glimpse at internal thoughts outside of a definitive narrative as "stream of consciousness" then they will think that is what this is), I have to acknowledge that there isn't much obvious structure to the book. That, however, is a strength and not a weakness. There is a sense of a chronological flow, whether from the beginning of her sleepless year or through a sleepless night, but each meditation is also a relatively independent piece of writing. I say relatively because there are threads other than sleeplessness that run through the book.Life is stressful and whether in the form of fear, anxiety, or a hybrid of the two that stress can amplify any other physical issue. I have always been a "bad sleeper," prone to waking and then maybe getting back to sleep eventually. In the past few years I have had bouts of sleeplessness, usually no longer than a week to three weeks. I know how much that disrupts my life and how every little, and not so little, element of life becomes something to fret over while I try to empty my mind to sleep. I can't imagine a year of that.But the things that Harvey writes about will speak to not only other insomniacs but anyone who ever takes the time to ponder life's incongruities. Things that make little to no sense and even more perplexing those things that make perfect sense but are simply wrong or bad. I have my always ready topics that wait just below the surface, ready to expand into every corner of my mind if I have a bad sleep, or sleepless, night. I think most of us do. This book is relatable for those who know this about themselves.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.