Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams

Like Alvarez's book The Savage God a Study of Suicide, and Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, Night takes one big subject and looks at it from a bunch of different angles. The book takes on - dreams and nightmares, the fear of the dark, night shift work, the history of lighting, night motif's in painting and literature, etc. Alvarez is a respected literary critic and non-fiction writer and he approaches this subject using techniques from both disciplines. As a critic he analyzes and reflects on what artists have had to say on the subject. The book starts with the poem, Acquainted with the Night, by Robert Frost and ends with a quote from Krapp's Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett. Many pages have passages from writers such as Stevenson, Freud and Coleridge, with Alvarez using them to examine a subject like the connection between dreams and surrealism. As a non-fiction writer he actively participates in the subject and then writes first hand. For example, he goes to a sleep laboratory and goes on a 'ride-along' with the police in Manhattan. I found this a fascinating book. Alvarez the writer is what makes it for me. (I doubt if I'd enjoy a similar book by, say, Harold Bloom or some other academic. Alvarez writes to be actually enjoyed.). He's serious but playful, has a casual sophistication, a curious and skeptical mind, and a direct writing style. I'm a fan of his work in general and I think this is one of his best. "The thing which in the waking world comes nearest to a dream is night in a big town, where nobody knows one, or the African night. There too is infinite freedom; it is there that things are going on, destinies are made round you, there is freedom on all sides, and it is none of you concern." - Karen Blixen, pg 262.

"Night" is a book of essays on the subjects of "darkness, sleep, dreams, the unconscious, sex, violence, crime, fear, ghosts, fire, and light." Alvarez illuminates and connects these subjects, and I can do no better service to a potential reader than to quote from his preface: "This is a book about the many faces of night: the night around us and the night within, the literal and the metaphorical, the dark of the moon and the dark night of the soul." As his book "The Savage God" is a very personal essay on suicide, so too is this book imbued with Alvarez's fear, knowledge, and recollection of night. If it were fiction, "Night" might be classified as a work 'magical realism'. Since it is non-fiction, the best classification I can come up with is 'dream-state realism'. The publishers of "Night" threw up their metaphorical hands and classified it as 'psychology'.The photographs and paintings that Alvarez chose to accompany his text are particularly haunting. One in particular: an untitled photograph by Roger Parry shows a dark room with a dull beam of light streaming in through a half-opened door. The photograph was taken from inside the room and a few objects can be dimly seen: a daguerrotype propped upside-down against the dark wainscoting; a length of rope that might be fastened into a noose. Alvarez has this to say about the photograph: "I no longer remember how I populated the darkness, but I remember the fear itself, particularly of the darkness that shrouded the upper floor, where I slept." In turn, he caused me to remember the upper room in my grandparents' house where I used to sleep. The light-switch was behind the door and next to a closet. I had to go into the dark behind the door to turn on the light, and as I did so, the closet door would seem to swing open---Read "Night" and see what memories return to haunt you.