A calendar of sleepless nights, when everything cries out for existence and a little love

Children of no one, the insomniacs do not sleep because they fear the dreams that reveal the truth about our failures and our unconfessable desires. Thus Iris, the protagonist of Elvira Seminara’s novel "Lunario dei giorni insonni" (Einaudi), isolates herself in a house belonging to old friends that is due to be cleared out, daydreaming about the melting glaciers – for nothing is eternal any more – and trying to perfect unhappiness, ‘a healthy unhappiness’.

And the reason is this: “Unhappiness must be cultivated and preserved. It is a subversive act against the capitalist hegemony of pleasure”. Indeed, today, like everything else, “happiness is a business; you can buy it. The more you spend, the happier you are – or rather, the happier you appear to be”. But this is the view of Flavio, himself a night-time psychoanalyst (via the internet) who is fleeing an oppressive wife, just as Iris is fleeing the man she is divorcing. Flavio presents himself as a simple flatmate, with no romantic or sexual complications – at least in his intentions. Iris, on the other hand, simply wants to save herself from the ‘obsessive maintenance of life’ and find some peace. But is it possible to be at peace if that peace isn’t found within?

In the silence and solitude where she seeks to be touched only by the music she chooses, she sees things she did not see before and hears things she did not hear before, but is this enough? “Everything demands existence,” she asserts, paraphrasing Daniele Mencarelli’s beautiful title “Tutto chiede salvezza” and taking stock of the things around her, as in one of the poetic lists by the Japanese writer Sei Shōnagon – distant in the centuries yet utterly modern. And here I am surprised, because Elvira Seminara reveals to me that she is unfamiliar with this writer. Indeed, she resembles her but does not name her amongst the many authors she cites – from Dostoevsky to Chatwin – who have taught her something, such as Henry James, who maintained that one should not kill spiders or break their webs because, as Iris explains, “A spider’s web is the writer’s gaze; it is a flexible and transparent filter” and “…when you kill a spider, it is as if you were killing Proust or Balzac…”

The protagonist of this Lunario is an extraordinary woman who harbours bizarre, sometimes unjustified thoughts; she is searching for a nocturnal self that is drawn to daylight, even though she prefers the sudden illumination of the night; she gazes at the stars and worries about the fate of the Earth, which is spinning more slowly due to global warming, and about the ever-warmer seas in which so many fish can no longer survive… These are the thoughts of a child of our times – uncertain and worrying times in which humanity’s destiny is proving ever more clearly self-destructive and mad, and there is no refuge even in the cool stillness of the night.

Seminara’s writing is striking for its freedom and density of information, and for the way it moves between multiple focal points, as there is no single focal point – especially outside the realm of literature. And then it’s lovely that, amidst the unravelling of everything, he doesn’t give up on a love story; and so Iris, whilst Flavio utters – whilst talking about something entirely different – a series of verbs in the second-person plural – ‘we rise and fall, we pray and we err, we rise again, we return, we stray and we sing’… – she hears only ‘-amo’ in every word; it was magnificent. I prayed that it would never end.”

Because, in the end, that is precisely how it is: if everything cries out for salvation and for existence, it is a stroke of luck that somewhere, love is still there – and always will be – to lend a hand, even if it is made of pure illusion: it is, after all, a way of giving substance to dreams, even those we stubbornly shun. And in this book, written as if on the run, skimming over familiar or unseen territories, with the wind in our sails as they say, the meaning lies precisely in the dream which, circumventing our disbelief, comes true. Because, as the author concludes: ‘You can never defend yourself too much against life’. And that’s a good thing.