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languages I cannot speak, I think of you, Angela. Great washtubs full of sheets remind me of more than one.

    The work of memory, this memory, is choosing, most emphatically, to think about women, especially women serving out lives of hard labor, those whom exquisitely written books customarily ignore. Justice requires that they be remembered. Pictured. Summoned to the feast of the imagination and of language.
    Of course, you summon ghosts at your peril. The sufferings of others can bleed into your soul. You try to protect yourself. Memory is inventive. Memory is a performance. Memory invites itself, and is hard to turn away. Hence the ravishing insight that gives the book its title: that remembering is intimately connected with insomnia. Memories are what make it hard for you to sleep. Memories procreate. And the uninvited memories always seem to the point. (As in fiction: whatever is included is connected.) The boldness and virtuosity of Hardwick’s associativeness intoxicate.
    On the last page, in the peroration with which Sleepless Nights concludes, the narrator observes, in a final summative delirium:

    Mother, the reading glasses and the assignation near the clammy faces, so gray, of the intense church ladies. And then a lifetime with its mound of men climbing on and off.
    The torment of personal relations. Nothing new there except in the disguise, and in the escape on the wings of adjectives. Sweet to be pierced by daggers at the end of paragraphs.

    Nothing new except language, the ever found. Cauterizing the torment of personal relations with hot lexical choices, jumpy punctuation, mercurial sentence rhythms. Devising more subtle, more engorged ways of knowing, of sympathizing, of keeping at hay. It’s a matter of adjectives. It’s where the stress falls.
    [2001]

Afterlives:
    The Case of Machado de Assis
    I MAGINE A WRITER WHO , in the course of a moderately long life in which he never traveled farther than seventy-five miles from the capital city where he was born, created a huge body of work … a nineteenth-century writer, you will interrupt; and you will be right: author of a profusion of novels, novellas, stories, plays, essays, poems, reviews, political chronicles, as well as reporter, magazine editor, government bureaucrat, candidate for public office, founding president of his country’s Academy of Letters; a prodigy of accomplishment, of the transcending of social and physical infirmity (he was a mulatto and the son of a slave in a country where slavery was not abolished until he was almost fifty; he was epileptic); who, during this vividly prolific, exuberantly national career, managed to write a sizable number of novels and stories deserving of a permanent place in world literature, and whose masterpieces, outside his native country, which honors him as its greatest writer, are little known, rarely mentioned.
    Imagine such a writer, who existed, and his most original books, which continue to be discovered more than eighty years after his death. Normally, the filter of time is just, discarding the merely celebrated or successful, rescuing the forgotten, promoting the underestimated. In the afterlife of a great writer—this is when the mysterious questions of 30
value and permanence are resolved. Perhaps it is fitting that this writer, whose afterlife has not brought his work the recognition it merits, should have had himself so acute, so ironic, so endearing a sense of the posthumous.
     
     
    WHAT IS TRUE of a reputation is true—should be true—of a life. Since it is only a completed life that reveals its shape and whatever meaning a life can have, a biography that means to be definitive must wait until after the death of its subject. Unfortunately, autobiographies can’t be composed under these ideal circumstances. And virtually all the notable fictional autobiographies have respected the limitation of real ones, while conjuring up a next-best equivalent of the illuminations of death. Fictional