Book review: The Art of Sleeping Alone
For 12 years, starting at 27, French writer Sophie Fontanel turned her body into a carnal no-fly zone.
by Sophie Fontanel
(translated by Linda Coverdale)
Scribner
3 stars
Dwight Garner
For 12 years, starting at 27, French writer Sophie Fontanel turned her body into a carnal no-fly zone.
The results, she reports in her new memoir, were instantaneous and long-lasting. "I'd begun to glow," she declares. "My backbone was much straighter." Friends "asked me if I was in love". It was like yoga, without the sore arches.
Fontanel is an editor at French Elle, and her book is a bestseller in her native country. It is a searching investigation into the power of no.
The first thing to say about The Art of Sleeping Alone is that it's very French. It's slim, chic and humourless - a sophisticated bagatelle of a volume, filled with detours to exotic locales: the Sahara, Goa, the Greek island of Hydra.
There's little in the way of biography: we learn almost nothing about Fontanel's family, schooling or job. Among the things that propels you forward is the mystery of when, exactly, sex began to seem like a terrible deal for her. With the exception of a blurry vignette about an older man and a hotel room when she was 13 - was this a sexual assault? - no attempt is made to explain the origins of her emotional feedback. Each detail is free-floating.