Liminal Literature

What to Read at Night

I tend to wake up at night. Like really wake up — wide awake — for a couple of hours most nights. So I finally just began reading during those hours. When I made this decision to spend the time reading instead of trying to go back to sleep, I had a few books already going, one of which was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and another one was Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. 

I noticed that I consistently reached for the Jane Eyre at night and Intimacies during the day. I’ve concluded that in the daytime, I’m too much in the present world to easily read anything not set in the present world. But in the still, dark of night, I easily slip into the descriptions of cold stone houses and bogs and moors of the Brontës, and most recently the new translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way, a weird tale of family, love, and place, which appropriately begins with the narrator's thoughts about being up at night. 

Something about the blank slate of 3am allows old worlds to come in believably in a way that they won't for me in the daytime. These older books tend to have intricate sentences, references to cultures long past that the reader is assumed to understand, and they go on at length about things that tend be explained more briefly in a contemporary book so we can get on with the plot already — all of which I can be impatient with during the day, but not at night. Instead, the worlds in these books unfold differently, with encompassing depth and elaborate detail until I really know these people, their places and the objects that surround them in a strangely familiar way. 

This would all be great if I didn't need to get up to drive kids to school at 7am, but oh well, as long as I’m awake in the middle of the night anyway, I might as well enjoy these classics. And if you happen to be awake at night too, you might try reading one of these older books during this liminal time too.

Culture This Week

Books

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Intimacies is set in the city of The Hague, in the Netherlands, and follows a woman translator who works at the court and her strange life with people she barely knows as friends. First of all, I didn’t know the Hague was an entire city. How I made it this long without understanding this, I don’t know. But indeed, while The Hague is the International Court, it is also located in a city of the same name! And it's an interesting choice for the setting of a story. It gives it tension, and like a second language, the protagonist's life isn’t native to her, but feels transcribed, like she has been overlaid over something else. I loved the interiority of this novel and recommend it.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

This book could only have been written by a woman. I recently reread this and have to say I’d forgotten the entire thing, so I recommend it even if you’ve read it before. Jane is incredibly self-possessed and navigates her misogynist world expertly, all on her own terms — very inspiring. It still feels contemporary in spite of some of the language but I do recommend trying to read it at night (see above) in order to fall deeply into the setting and enjoy the illustrative description.