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Nothing: A Portrait Of Insomnia (2011)

by Blake Butler(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0061997382 (ISBN13: 9780061997389)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Harper Perennial

review 1: "THE SOUND OUR DOGS UNDERSTOOD ABOUT US, SEEING. SLEEPING IN THOSE ROOMS; THE WORDS WRITTEN ON THEIR RIBS." I'm not sure why or whether I was expecting something different. Sure, the backflapcopy says "nonfiction," says "memoir"; I found this book (a practical joke?) in Health and Medicine--Sleep at Powell's. Someone coming upon it there would, I think, react violently. But this is a Blake Butler book.
review 2: This is a great memoir that provides one of the pleasures of a really, to my taste, well done memoir. It is conversational and I feel as if the Butler has no axes to grind and is mostly interested in somehow capturing and preserving his mind in action around a subject. In this case he is trying to capture the world and his brain while not sleeping or be... moreing unable to sleep. Thinking about it now while typing this I can't really think of a many memoirs (a kind of inaccurate term of this book since Butler isn't concerned with the events of his life so much as his thought as a kind of event or the process of his thought as a kind of way of being) that capture this sense of a person thinking honestly about himself. There is the more standard Janet Frame Autobiography and maybe some diaries like Ann Franks. Maybe Nicholson Baker's U and I? less

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