Book Review: Lying Awake

Lying Awake at amazon.com

Book Review: Lying Awake

Reader Rating: 7/10

Salaams! Just finished up a slim volume called Lying Awake, by Mark Salzman. Salzman is the author of another wonderful book called Iron and Silk, about his experiences in China in the 1980s teaching ESL and studying Wushu (traditional Chinese martial arts). He has also written an interesting modern "Chinese Fairy Tale" book called The Laughing Sutra (I thoroughly enjoyed this book!).

Lying Awake chronicles four months in the life of a cloistered nun living in a modern-day Los Angeles Carmelite monastery. Sister John of the Cross (yes, nuns even take male saints names!) has been earnestly seeking to know God better for many, many years, but has often felt spiritually dry, alone, and out of touch with God. In contrast, the last three years she has been having ecstatic visions and bouts of incredible spiritual clarity, all of which has overflowed through her pen into well-received volumes of poetry. But, these bright insights into God's glory and radiance have also brought blinding headaches and fainting spells that seem to be increasingly dangerous.

The central conflict for Sister John is whether or not she is willing to "give up" these wonderful spiritual experiences by undergoing medical treatment (and a "cure") which could possibly mean her experiences had been not genuine. This crisis of belief and faith (not unlike what Blackaby describes in his "Experiencing God" cycle), and its eventual outcome, are at the core of this well-written book's theme and underlying motifs.

Right at the crux of this crisis is the comment made by the monastery's priest to Sister John: "You allowed yourself to think that loving God meant enjoying His company, having ecstasies. It was all about you., wasn't it? But loving God is supposed to be all about Him."

Lying Awake
by MARK SALZMAN "Sister John of the Cross pushed her blanket aside, dropped to her knees on the floor of her cell, and offered the day to God..." (more)

Search inside this book
Price: $9.00 & Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. See details
185 used & new from $1.70
Edition: Paperback
Hardcover (1st ed)
$22.00
$14.96
162 used & new from $1.50  

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
In his third novel, Lying Awake, Mark Salzman breaks the primary rule of fiction by creating a protagonist who has virtually no external life. Sister John of the Cross, a middle-aged nun cloistered in a Carmelite monastery in contemporary Los Angeles, languished for years in a spiritual drought--"her prayers empty and her soul dry"--until she suddenly received God's grace in the form of intense mystical visions. So vivid have her visions become that they burn a kind of afterglow into her mind that she transcribes into crystalline (and highly popular) verse. The only downside is that they are accompanied by excruciating headaches that cause her to black out.

The story hinges on Sister John's discovery that her visions are in fact the result of mild epileptic seizures. As she learns from her neurologist, temporal-lobe epilepsy commonly brings about "hypergraphia (voluminous writing), an intensification but also a narrowing of emotional response, and an obsessive interest in religion and philosophy." Dostoyevsky, the classic victim of this condition, wrote of his raptures: "There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of eternal harmony.... If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear." An exact description of Sister John's visions. The question she now faces is whether to go ahead with surgery--and risk obliterating both her spiritual life and her art--or cling to a state of grace that may actually be a delusion ignited by an electrochemical imbalance.

Using a very limited palette, Mark Salzman creates an austere masterpiece. The real miracle of Lying Awake is that it works perfectly on every level: on the realistic surface, it captures the petty squabbles and tiny bursts of radiance of life in a Los Angeles monastery; deeper down it probes the nature of spiritual illumination and the meaning and purpose of prayer in everyday life; and, at bottom, there lurks a profound meditation on the mystery of artistic inspiration. Salzman made a highly auspicious debut in 1986 with Iron and Silk, a memoir of his years in China, and since then he has dramatically changed key in every book--most recently from the absurdist American suburban chronicle of Lost in Place to the artistic-crisis-cum-courtroom-drama novel The Soloist. Lying Awake is quieter and more sober than Salzman's previous narratives, but it is also more accomplished, more thought-provoking, and more highly crafted. --David Laskin--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details
• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (October, 2001)
• ISBN: 0375706062
• Average Customer Review: based on 90 reviews. (Write a review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank in Books: #7,589

=============================
"If you're not standing on the Edge,
you're taking up too much room."
=============================