Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In the last hundred years we have lost touch with night..." (more)
Key Phrases: night within the night, dreaming brain, hypnagogic hallucinations, New York, Allan Hobson, Alphabet City (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Scared of the dark? The author of the best-selling The Savage God (LJ 4/1/72) here examines our response to night, eventually linking it to creativity.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 290 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st Edition, Ex-lib edition (January 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039303724X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393037241
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,460,522 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting essays on Every Aspect of Darkness, December 28, 2000

By	E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Night (Paperback)

"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.