Naked Sleeper: A Novel - Hardcover

Nunez, Sigrid

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060172762 ISBN 13: 9780060172763

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1996

Synopsis

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?

About this title

Reviews

Nunez's first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, was a work of stark insight and poetic imagination; her second displays the range of her talent, especially her sensitivity to the wellsprings of character and behavior. The story of a troubled woman's quest for identity, it is also a deft exploration of the randomness of fate, the crucial influence of time and place (where things happen, and when, determines responses that might be different under other circumstances) and the fragility of human relationships. An emotionally crippling event during childhood?her parents separated and she lost contact with her father, a painter whose reputation has grown since his early death?conditioned Nona's constricted response to life. Now, married to Roy, a voice teacher, and living in Greenwich Village, she has apparently silenced her demons. But when she attends a country retreat to work on the book she is writing about her father and is passionately wooed by Lyle, a married lothario whose true nature eludes her, Nona's emotional equilibrium is radically altered. Impulsively, she decides to join Lyle in Santa Fe to see if his love will help her discover her destiny. Nunez reveals Lyle's true character slowly, as Nona herself gradually discovers it and realizes the extent of her folly. Nona and Roy pay the price of her self-destructive behavior in several ways, but just as they seem reprieved from tragedy, they are struck by a bizarre?but sadly plausible?quirk of fate. Nunez exhibits impeccable control of her narrative, as she charts Nona's floundering steps toward self-understanding and maturity, meanwhile revealing the secrets of other lives that affect hers. This is a haunting story, resonant with hard-won wisdom. $30,000 ad/promo; rights: Harriet Wasserman.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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. ($30,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nunez has produced a lovely novel reminiscent of her first work, A Feather on the Breath of God (HarperCollins, 1994), in its evocative style. A teacher in New York City happily married to Roy, Nona is writing a book aimed at recapturing the father who deserted her as a child. At the same time, she must contend with a larger-than-life mother and a man named Lyle who sends her importuning letters proclaiming his undying love. At a retreat on the estate of her friend Phoebe, whose father was her artist father's mentor, anxious, insomniac Nona begins to face up to the terrible wound created by her father's indifference, the humiliation of feeling "tainted" around her closed-lip relatives, and the mystery of her father's death. She runs off with Lyle, separates from Roy ("How could you?" says her exasperated mother), and begins to find peace. The result is a thoughtful, nicely nuanced work that goes down easily. For popular collections.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Nunez's second novel is even more resonant than her first, A Feather on the Breath of God (1994). A riveting psychological drama, it is structured like a spiral staircase, and each twist grants you a new and surprising vista. Nona, attractive and happily married, is working on a book about her father. She was told, as a child, that Shep, a painter, left his wife and daughter to devote himself to art, but the truth was that he was gay, a closely guarded secret that estranged Nona from both parents and left her unwilling to have a family of her own. Her kind husband wants children and is being patient, but Nona, an insomniac with self-destructive tendencies, gets involved with another man, a dreadful fellow, then moves out. As Nunez adroitly traces the convolutions of Nona's psyche and the consequences of her actions, she introduces terrific auxiliary characters and illuminates a full spectrum of emotions, emphasizing our ability to heal and proceed, strengthened by our ordeals. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060172762
• ISBN 13: 9780060172763
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240