Overview
Feckless, nervous, irresolute, often troubled with insomnia, Nona longs for a life of firm purpose, order, and dignity. To do whatever is the work before her, letting nothing distract her, expecting nothing, fearing nothing - the way of the Stoics - this is her ideal. But despite all her stratagems, this ideal constantly eludes her. Life is too unpredictable, her sense of self too fragile, and human and relationships are too tenuous. She muddles along, a victim of her own anxieties and resentments, her behavior often as mystifying to herself as it is to others. Why, though happily married, does she fly across the country to pursue a man she hardly knows, whom she intuitively mistrusts and does not even much care for? In the aftermath of this calamity, Nona separates from her husband and undergoes a period of intense self-examination. Meanwhile, she struggles to complete a book about her father, a painter, who died when she was a child. Out of both projects, her work of introspection and her work of memory, arise thorny questions about love, identity, and destiny. Unexpected support appears in the form of one of the her father's old lovers, whom Nona now meets for the first time. But while this new friendship thrives, relations between Nona and her husband, and between Nona and her mother, with whom she shares an anguished history, seem to be coming apart. Nona has barely achieved a somewhat surer sense of herself and her way in the world when a series of grave, unforeseeable events threaten her precarious equilibrium. Naked Sleeper is about the inescapable and sometimes unendurable complexities of love and the family drama. It is the story of a woman's search for self-knowledge, for understanding of others, and for an answer to the imperative question: How should she live?Editorials
Atlantic Monthly
An intelligent and poignant examination of social and erotic displacement and written with such extraordinary and seemingly unstudied conviction that one accepts every word of it as truth. An impressive debut.Los Angeles Times
A remarkable, often disturbing portrait...Nunez's language throughout is spare, utterly lacking in sentimentality.New York Times Book Review
A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent.Philadelphia Enquirer
Magnificent...A Feather on the Breath of God brilliantly succeeds in describing a life on the fringe, outside of conventional categories of cultural and personal identity...A remarkable book, full of strange brilliance, trembling with fury and tenderness, innocence and wisdom, despair and hope.Washington Post
Sigrid Nunez nearly transforms literature into ballet.Kirkus Reviews
The promise Nunez revealed in her acclaimed 1995 debut, A Feather on the Breath of God, is here fulfilled and magnified, as she follows the struggles of a woman to know her father and understand herself, labors that imperil her once secure marriage.Nona, little loved as a child and a pill-dependent insomniac as an adult, has found a measure of happiness hitherto unknown in her five-year marriage to Roy, with whom she shares a love of music and New York City life. Trouble erupts, however, during a monthlong visit to a friend's country estate, to which she retreats to work on a book about her father—an artist long dead, but out of her life even before that—when she meets brooding, handsome English prof Lyle and inexplicably finds herself opening up to him. He swamps her with love letters when they return to their respective homes, until she decides to visit him for a weekend in Tucson. His passion proves to have been written with disappearing ink, but back in New York, Nona finds that her marriage has slipped its moorings in her absence: She and Roy separate with rapidly dwindling hopes of reconciliation. In despair, she picks up the book project again, contacting her father's last lover, a man, who warms to her and reveals a side of daddy she never knew. She draws some comfort from her emerging knowledge of her father. Yoga and meditation, along with a dog, also provide comfort, enabling her to cope with a near- miss from breast cancer, and when Ray proposes a honeymoon they never had, she finds herself ready, tentatively, to begin again—a decision sorely tested when yet another unexpected disaster disrupts their lives.
No dazzling, high-powered dynamics here, but, rather, a steady, superbly insightful study of a life as quietly complex as the reader's own: a tale that touches the heart of what it is to be human.