“Months of wet weather must have followed. Trusting in her own heart has become a complex endeavour. More than that, in fact: on whether she ever loved him. She goes on dates years after losing her husband – she treats the bodies of these men as playthings and has grown so stoic that she frequently looks back at her brief life with her husband and ponders on whether he ever loved her. This isolation is reflected in the cold aloofness of our character. If you cannot plan or predict your life, and you can’t ever fully rely on those closest to you, then you are truly, frightfully alone. A feeling of loneliness pervades in a big and very successful way. That we may never truly know one another as much as we’d like to, or as much as we think we do. That there is a deeply felt unfairness with regards to our own plans versus the chaotic randomness of the universe. What this affecting story leaves us with, upon its closure, is the nervous unease that life doesn’t care about us. And perhaps it’s best that you do – that you help carry that momentum until the end. The mystery of his suicide is what drives the story for the majority of this slender little book, which can be easily read in a single sitting. Ton left no note the suicide was done in his greenhouse on an innocuous day with no apparent triggering. As she bakes, she recalls her recent dates and sexual adventures as a widow, and the short marriage she lived through with her husband Ton at the turn of the ‘70s – a marriage which lasted only fourteen months before Ton took his own life. Sleepless Night is told through a successful framing device: our nameless protagonist often finds herself troubled into restless insomnia and so, when this occurs, she pops into the kitchen and spends the rest of the dark night baking. A private matter, that was all it had ever been.” My husband had shaken off this existence, including our time together, without a word. “As I turned away from my late husband’s face, impervious now to tears or laughter … it occurred to me for the first time that there was no note. This is partly due – at least in the case of Sleepless Night – to the careful and precise translation of David Doherty. Now in her later years, she is, at last, making a name for herself internationally. Before becoming a household name as an author, her life was dedicated to music. However, she did initially study – and later teach – classical piano. Margriet de Moor herself has lived a fascinating life, celebrated dearly in her home country of The Netherlands. I do not need a clock to tell me how deep the darkness is. In Sleepless Night, Dutch author Margriet de Moor does just that. But all of these things can be disrupted, found to be lies, and may be called into question at any moment. We know what a friend should rightly be called on to do in the name of trust and kindness.
We can predict a good marriage, and should expect one, too. We are often told the right ways to love and be loved: what our expectations of love should be and how we ourselves should behave in love.
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