This woman knows how to write!!! ( )

Reflections in the form of short story, personal essay, prose poetry and something more. Painful depictions of solitary life, women's lives mostly. The I character has an acute eye. Her detail is sharp. She's insightful. She strikes a couple of nerves. (She handles Billie Holiday brilliantly.) I was disturbed by it. Hardwick has left me much to consider, which is what a near perfect novel should do. ( )

[...] Sleepless Nights feels as if someone had written the most vivid and witty of diaries for several decades, then ripped out all the pages and tossed them into the air. The reader wanders into this experiment in Dada with Hardwick, picking up a moment here, an encounter there, trying to make meaning out of seemingly random conjunctions. And how, after all, does one make meaning out of a life?

[A much longer review can be found at http://sycoraxpine.blogspot.com/2007/... ] ( )

Novella, memoir, a series of only vaguely related sketches of people and places the author has dreamed of or known? Categorizing this slim volume is nearly impossible but that hardly matters when the prose in question is as beautiful and evocative as Hardwick's. There's very little "narrative" here and nothing that can be called a plot; readers looking for a "story" are bound to be confused or disappointed, but accepted on its own terms this little book is full of more honesty, poetry, joy, pain and hard-won wisdom than many larger, more structured works. One of the loveliest books I've read in a long, long time. ( )