Top 10sFictionThese moments of precious fresh awareness can be found in authors from Oliver Sacks to Ottessa Moshfegh and Franz Kafka
In Salvador Salvador Dalí’s painting Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, a floating woman lies beneath a bayonet-wielding tiger who, along with its friend, has recently pounced from the mouth of a fish, which has itself just emerged from an exploding pomegranate. By the woman’s face, at the bottom of the painting, a tiny bee circles a smaller pomegranate. Her awakening will wrench the woman from one reality into another.
The following books contain both literal and metaphorical awakenings. As well as the disparate states of dreaming and wakefulness, they also illuminate what connects the two. Laughter awakens the unconscious, music awakens history. From psychoactive drugs to linguistic invention to sheer rage, in literature it seems there are as many bees and pomegranates as there are dreamers. And reading offers its own awakening, too – you look up from the page, the words still buzzing, and the world seems new. It’s interesting how many of these books are also thinking about authenticity – how to be yourself, how to stay awake to the uniqueness of others and the world.
While writing my debut novel Chrysalis, I wanted to invent a person that could inspire such paradigm shifts in others. In the story, three narrators bear witness to the transformation of a fourth character. For each of them, she is the gateway to their own awakenings: spiritual, artistic and existential.
1. Awakenings by Oliver Sacks
In the opening sections of this medical memoir, Sacks describes his patients’ catatonic state: “They would be conscious and aware – yet not fully awake; they would sit motionless and speechless all day in their chairs, totally lacking energy, impetus, initiative, motive, appetite, affect or desire.” They are suffering from encephalitis lethargica – “sleeping sickness” – and Sacks is telling the story of their responses to the drug L-Dopa. Their illness has separated them not just from family, friends and society, but also from more fundamental things such as language and feeling. Their awakenings are remarkable in that they are in fact re-awakenings, the recovery of long-absent selves.
2. White Tears by Hari Kunzru
Kunzru’s novel follows music nerds Seth and Carter, who are in the business of adding “authentic” vintage-vinyl sound to new music: “Make it dirty. Drown it in hiss. I want it to sound like a record that’s been sitting on someone’s porch for 40 years.” When they create a new-old record from a sound recording of a busker on the street, collectors are keen to get their hands on what they see as a missing classic, a long-lost piece of blues history. In the act of appropriation, the commodification and exploitation of black culture in white hands, a piece of history is awakened, wreaking havoc on the present. Kunzru’s ability to dramatise this haunting in prose is sublime.
3. Keeping in Touch by Anjali Joseph
This is a book about light, where to find it, how to make it. The writing feels light, too – sharp and funny, effortlessly smart. It tells the pleasingly haphazard love story of Ved and Keteki, who first meet in an airport lounge and proceed to run circles around each other in Mumbai, London, Guwahati and Jorhat. There are moments of pure brilliance, in which they are allowed to live in one another’s full attention. And just as they drift towards and away from another, so I find myself coming back to them, wondering where they might be now. The novel ends with a spiritual awakening, though it’s not where you might expect to find it – which makes perfect sense in a book where the characters always seem to be looking for what they need in slightly the wrong place.
4. Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
Levy begins with an epigraph – “It’s up to you to break the old circuits” – from Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa. Like Cixous, Levy is interested in the relationship between the body and language, how the body sometimes speaks louder than words. The story follows a long-suffering daughter, Sofia, who takes her mother, Rose, to Spain as they seek a cure for Rose’s mysterious, shifting symptoms. As Sofia becomes freer and angrier, Rose retreats further into illness. It’s a novel that pushes its characters to awaken themselves and each other in order to break from the darker psychic material pulling the strings of their lives.
5. To 2040 by Jorie Graham
The poet Jorie Graham once said (in an interview about an earlier collection, Sea Change): “There is another kind of knowledge we need in addition to that of the intellect. These are feelings we need to awaken – earlier, more ancient, human feelings of belonging in creation. That is what I am trying to awaken in myself and others in this book.” In To 2040, apocalypse finds new voice. Names are lost and concepts fall away. The future is spectral and difficult, full of gaps. These poems illuminate a radically different relationship with nature and environmentalism – an emotional, physical and spiritual awakening that might change us where thinking cannot.
6. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, translated by Susan Bernofsky
Surely one of the most memorable awakenings in literary history: Gregor Samsa finds himself in bed one morning, no longer a man but a giant insect. While it seems, at first, that the transformation has already taken place, the story proceeds to describe a slower awakening as Gregor’s mind grapples with the reality of the body.
7. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
A young, beautiful, hyper-privileged woman decides to sleep for a year, enabled by an unhinged psychiatrist who prescribes her whatever she likes. The awakening – determinedly social and historical – that comes in the novel’s final pages is both tender and tragic, as it returns its misanthropic, isolated protagonist to the world.
8. English Magic by Uschi Gatward
In each of these stories, it feels as though Gatward is picking the seam of a flimsy but familiar reality to reveal a darker, political truth. In The Bird, an unsettling domestic story of a gull trapped behind a fireplace, she writes: “Dazzled, it looks like it’s forgotten what the world is.” Looking up from these stories feels similarly disorientating – their subtle reconfigurations of society demand a reawakening.
9. The Cellist by Jennifer Atkins
In this brilliant, slight novel, a cellist, Luc, meets a lover and, for the first time, finds she must learn to split her erotic energy between her music and her relationship. It’s the story of a sexual awakening that disrupts an older, steadier, more solitary love. The strength of the book is in its conflicting desires. The awakening arrives unbidden, and Luc, even as she surrenders to it, is never unaware of its cost.
10. Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir
In one of the most enlivening works of non-fiction I’ve ever read, Alsadir presents laughter as a disruptive, spontaneous moment of revolution – a ludicrous, unstoppable bid for freedom. Animal Joy is a big-hearted book that makes light work of eclectic material, weaving psychoanalytic theory and literary criticism with autographical writing on motherhood and Alsadir’s experiences of clown school. Through the fragments, a bold and joyful argument emerges: a reclamation of authenticity, aliveness and contingency. It’s a book of small and vital awakenings; a book that might just inspire you to be yourself.
Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe is published by Granta. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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