Buzz Sociopolitics Malaysia: Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia - By Blake Butler

Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia - By Blake Butler - Book Review

It's hard to ignore the force of the sentences in Blake Butler's brand brand new book, "Nothing: the Portrait of Insomnia." Best well known for his fiction, Butler is obsessed with the possibilities of syntax, as well as the many viewable feature of "Nothing" is the verse as well as intellectual buffer overflow which results in long, often interestingly ungrammatical sentences, sometimes stretching over six pages. The many ornate of these is adorned with footnotes, the curtsy to David Foster Wallace, to whose memory the book is dedicated. As such the book draws attention to the own linguistic surfaces in ways which many memoirs never attempt.

Illustration by Ted McGrath

NOTHING

A Portrait of Insomnia

By Blake Butler

326 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $ 14.99.

Let's backtrack for the moment. "Nothing" might or might not be the memoir, though the uncertainty isn't in the place you expect: it's certainly not the dressed-up novel. Instead the heart is some-more interestingly split in between personal narration, the range of memoir, as well as meditation, the range of essay. Butler's heated personal story of sleeplessness offers the horizon for the book. Much of the initial half is clinging to narrating as well as re-enacting which history, interwoven with short discussions of night, light as well as sleeplessness. The dependence upon personal knowledge peaks midway by with Butler's absolute account of living with his father, who, saddled with severe dementia, loses some-more as well as some-more of his self every day. Then the book's letter heart starts to take over, heading us in to some-more abstract, loopy territory.

I make use of "loopy" here in the technical sense. "Nothing" is deeply concerned with looping as wel! l as cir cular thinking, both in subject (the writing of mechanism code, for instance) as well as in style. Most of Butler's sentences stretch over the hundred-word mark, kept aloft by repeating licks, linguistic tics, seperated by dashes as well as surprising, sometimes fantastic language. The outcome is the firework-studded poetry you knowledge during very tighten range.

The ambition is not just to represent though to enact for the reader the breathless, spinning cycle of Butler's own insomniac thoughts, to suggest us interiority: not the outline of knowledge though knowledge itself, or the best simulation. And most of which knowledge is the single of being caught in the loop or the noose, grinding by the pathways of Butler's brain: "Such kind of drifting mental spin all but answer is the kind so many nights which keeps me up prolonged after you lay down, stranded in unavoidable emplacement over nothing, pointless meditative the day again once come as well as left as well as zero brand brand new each day passed the way which days do."

The primary outcome of sentences similar to these is the absolute immersion. Reading them, you are running "Blake Butler" as the kind of executable software program in the hardware of the heads. This is the main appeal of first-person prose, whether novel or memoir: the clearly unmediated entrance to another's brain.

And Butler's brain is interesting, if frustrating. The book whirls, increasingly manic, tornadic, connecting as well as reconnecting discourse to imagining upon nap as well as sleeplessness, Derrida, David Foster Wallace, theories of extinction as well as the self, the dial-up bulletin-board enlightenment of the 1980s as well as early '90s, sex, pornography, mechanism programming as well as games, the sprawling digital sludge of the Internet's illusory everything, the (too slight) authority upon sleeplessness as well as the many remedies, self-loathing, self-destruction, self-consciousness as well as the end, sentences as well as their eventua! l ends, self as well as the unavoidable retraction in to sleep, stupidity or death.

The book's strength is the muchness as well as connection, the capability to hold many things as well as ideas aloft, caught in the inertia of the prose, the restless nighttime wander from subject to subject. After all, zero characterizes sleeplessness similar to which wander, the pattern all as well familiar to insomniacs.

Ander Monson's latest books are "The Available World: Poems" as well as "Vanishing Point: Not the Memoir."