cover image Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams

Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams

A. Alvarez. W. W. Norton & Company, $23 (290pp) ISBN 978-0-393-03724-1

Alvarez begins this delightful, serendipitous meditation on night, darkness, sleep, dreams and night life by discussing his own childhood terror of the dark, in a home seething with nighttime quarrels, and his middle-age addiction to sleep. He then visits an English sleep research lab, where he has his sleep monitored; travels to New York City to ride in a police squad car with cops on night patrol; and captures the nocturnal rhythms of London and of a Tuscan farmhouse in the Italian Appennines. In graceful, insightful prose, Alvarez (The Savage God: A Study of Suicide) analyzes imagery of light and dark from Shakespeare to John Cheever; scrutinizes the dream theories of Freud and Jung; examines dreams as a source of inspiration for Coleridge, Ionesco, Don DeLillo, French surrealists and scientists and inventors; and mulls the late-Victorian passion for ghost stories. His observation, ``Night contains whatever you care to put into it,'' serves as an apt keynote for this kaleidoscopic excursion. (Jan.)