#land of nod

Nod by Adrian Barnes

A masterpiece of a book

SPOILERS BTWS

So I just finished this book like 10 minutes ago and I’m still revelling in it.

So let’s start off first by saying this book is a fucking bittersweet soul wrenching masterpiece of a story that is honestly one of the most connected I’ve ever felt to when reading it, for me it’s on the same tier as never let me go, my favourite novel of all time.

The book is about Paul, a writer and his partner Tanya when one night not a single person gets a wink of sleep apart from a few thousand, Paul being one of them. The entire book is about seeing the world and everyone in it go to utter shit in the span of just 1 month as sleep deprivation and insanity takes over. But as our protagonist Paul is completely sane through all of this, he has to bare witness to the chaos in all his sanity including watching Tanya sink lower and lower into madness, as someone he doesn’t recognise.

I think the reason I love this book so much is because I can connect so clearly with Paul and even some of the other characters. From what I got while reading it, paul is a very aware man, he’s cynical and a down right pessimistic at times and even though I wouldn’t necessarily like to attribute those terms to myself I do understand him, this world he’s been thrust into shows his true thoughts with no filter as he feels no need for it anymore. No one has a filter in this world anymore.

It’s so heart wrenching watching his partner Tanya dissolve into someone you don’t know anymore, you don’t know whether she’s lying or saying what she’s always thought but social conventions stopped her from saying and it’s painful. Words are a motif with this story, as Paul is a writer everything comes back to words.

Theres so much more to this book but what I want to focus on as something that hit me like a shot to the heart was the ending, and authors note.

Nod ends with Paul finally succumbing to sleep, boarded up in his old Vancouver apartment . There’s nothing he can do for this world and the call of sleep is strong and peaceful after everything he’s been through.

The soul crushing goodbyes to everything mundane yet familiar and nostalgic in life, and also the things you will never get back at the end of the world and history is gone. But the kicker of this final entry is the fact that this is the final page.

It quite literally ends with Paul unable to finish his train of thought as he drifts of into eternal sleep, the golden dream; a peaceful yet sorrowful ending. When I tell you turning over the page to be started back at by a blank sheet was agonising.

Now after I finished this I went onto the authors note, an acclaimed essay by Adrian Barnes called “my cancer is as strange as my fiction” where he talks about being diagnosed with brain cancer just a year before Nod was to be published. He talks about how eerily similar Nods narrative is to his own experiences living with this tumour.

Barnes died in 2018 to his brain tumour with nod being his one and only novel published, it saddens me that we will never get anymore of his works especially after witnessing what he can create.

There’s so much more I want to talk about with this book but can’t formulate words right now haha, I want to do an essay on it in the future. Please please please give nod a go, it’s something that anyone can get into as it’s so undeniably human and it’s really not appreciated enough.

Nod

Adrian Barnes

I super dooper boober love this book and so I kinda just scribbled something for it

Basic premise, apocalyptic type situation of what would happen if 90% of the worlds population suddenly couldn’t sleep with only a few thousand “sleepers”

It’s gross and sad and disturbing and sometimes pretty horrifying and I love the main characters personality oh so much

Edit: more scribbles