Rating: 
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: I have been looking forward to this book for months, after reading Salzman's essay about writing it (published some months ago in the New Yorker). Too bad it is such thin gruel. The story is easily summarized in a single sentence. The characters are undeveloped. The few scenes with character and dialogue are emotionally absent. I found it nothing more than a Christian how-to manual, not a novel at all.
Rating: 
Summary: Well worth reading .....
Review: Mark Salzman has outdone himself with this novel of faith and motives. Sister John of the Cross, a Carmelite nun and poet whose substance comes from "visions", has sought earnestly to serve God. She has dealt admirably with her abandonment by her mother. She has persevered in her faith through spiritual famine. She has spent thirty years in a cloistered convent as God's willing servant. However, her greatest trial comes when her visions are diagnosed as epileptic seizures. Curable by surgery, the ecstasy she experiences during these seizures has been viewed as a blessing by her Carmelite Sisters. Will the Sisters now consider her a fraud? Should she choose surgery to correct her condition and prevent any further visions or should she refuse treatment and become a burden to her Order? Are her motives self-serving? Has God abandoned her, tricked her? I am amazed that Salzman (or any lay person) could write with such fairness and with such genuine respect for mainstream religion. In my most recent readings, traditional Christianity has been treated with disdain. Not so in Lying Awake. I thought Salzman wrote beautifully from the perspective of a woman who has taken vows of poverty and chastity. At one point, Sister John asks herself, "Have I been worshiping projections of my own neediness?" Everyone who considers himself/herself to be religious or spiritual, no matter the creed, could and should ask themselves this same question.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Excellent
Review: This is truly a work of staggering genius! I thoroughly (sp) enjoyed this. I was not familiar with this author but will try some of his other books. His style is excellent. I enjoy the pace and writing. If you enjoyed this book you would also like "Mariette in Ecstacy" by Ron Hansen.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Complicated
Review: I spotted this book while shelving in the library and after reading the jacket decided to take it home. The first few pages were engrossing, but unless one is familiar with nun terminology, the rest of the book can be distracting. Unfortunately, I became so frustrated that I never finished it. The concept is so interesting, though, that I may try to read it again later.
Rating: 
Summary: An inspired epileptic nun
Review: This is a charming book about life in a Carmelite convent for an inspired nun. Sister John of the Cross, the main character in this novel, writes poetry and books for hours on end, and has heavenly visions of god - a feeling of divine ecstasy. However, when she finds out she has epilepsy, and these visions are not a closeness to her god, but rather a tumor above her right ear, her world crumbles. Has she wasted her entire life devoting all of her time to god? What' most interesting in this story is an "intern" nun, Sister Miriam, that is deciding on whether she wants to be part of the nunnery. She takes solace in a nun that seems inspired, Sister John of the Cross, but lo and behold, this inspired nun is only an epileptic. As a reader you feel pity for the overly zealous religiosity of these nuns and quietly root for the intern nun to leave the convent and try to entertain a semi normal life. In a subtle way, Salzman brings up some interesting points about what type of people typically join the celibate life of the religious - typically women who have been emotionally abused in some way. Sister John of the Cross is no exception - abandoned by her mother at an early age. This book explored why we have faith and it also examined the fruitfulness of our labors. You admire the tenacity of the nuns' spirits, but pity their celibate and hollow lives.
Rating:
Summary: Overnight Questions
Review: I finished this book in one sitting last night and when I awoke this morning, I was found myself having second thoughts about it. First let me say that I love the way Salzman writes description and thought his way of relating the theme of religious mysticism versus the real world of medicine was incredibly well done. I also think he did a great job in creating the atmosphere of the monastery, its silences and its routine. I read an interview with Salzman which was incredibly interesting (can I say that it was at SALON?) about how he researched this book. He developed a friendship with a prioress in New Mexico after literally stumbling upon the monastery and knocking on the door, unannounced. He said he was surprised to find her very easy to talk to and a lot of fun as well. What was particularly intruiging was finding out that Salzman is an agnostic. I loved the details he included.... For example, when Sister John thinks about why there is no body on the crucifix in her cell....that this is so because she should be thinking of HER body on the cross. "It had no corpus because, in spirit, she belonged there, taking Christ's place and helping relieve his burden" is how he put it. Now my opinion about what I consider the weak points of this book: Although this book is primarily about the internal life of Sister John, Salzman peeks at her external life but never really goes into it in any detail. I think he should have done one or the other. For example, the flagellation. It just is seemingly thrown in and never explained, so it appears bizarre - just what many outsiders would think of cloistered orders. Also, I found the other characters to be pretty one-dimensional....but maybe this was a device of the author's to focus our attention only on Sister John and her inner turmoil. This book provides a lot of food for thought and discussion.
Rating:
Summary: Puzzling
Review: I like the way Marc Salzman writes; his command of the language, the way he puts sentences and paragraphs together. I just don't understand why in the world he would do this book. The topic, mysticism versus neurology, faith versus realism, is an interesting one, but this story simple poses the first question, and then stops there. I wonder much more about the setting. It seems like little more than an outsider's fantasy of what it would be like to be in a Carmelite cloister. Perhaps Salzman wasn't worried about realism, but if that was the case, why did he include prosaic details about what they ate that day, how they dressed, etc. One detail that really made me think Salzman had badly miscalculated comes far along in the book, when, almost as an aside, Salzman briefly describes a flagellation scene: these nuns (apparently) take out whips and beat themselves. I found this bizarre in the extreme, whereas Salzman blithely tosses it into the stream of events, seemingly unaware of how badly it fit into the picture he was trying to paint of the nuns. Although this particular order of nuns had many practices that could be considered extreme: silence, no shoes, total isolation--I don't think he was trying to paint them as freaks, which is how they come off after the flagellation episode. The nuns themselves I found to be cardboard characters for the most part, including the main character, who has epilepsy. Their speech, actions, reactions, seem calculated to allow for the straightforward exposition of Salzman's ideas about the faith/science conflict, rather than to flow naturally from real human personalities. I think Marc Salzman could probably write a marvelous essay on the questions he treats here; I wish he'd done that, instead of attempting to imagine himself into the mind of a cloistered mystic Carmelite nun. Way too much of a stretch for just about anyone, I'd say.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking and deeply personal
Review: I guess there are all times when we all question our existence and our faith in our religion, whatever it may be. Although this is a work of fiction, the author expresses so fluently, so beautifully the questions that arise in our own minds concerning our existence on earth, in his main character, Sister John. Mark Salzman has said many times how long it took him to write this novel and how tormented he was trying to create this book, questioning his own faith in himself as a writer. It takes such courage to write such a book, especially for a self-proclaimed agnostic. Although this is fiction, I encourage readers to take the time and explore their own thoughts, their own beliefs about God and faith in what they truly believe in.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing short of a marvel
Review: Mark Salzman's novel is about Sister John, a Carmelite nun, poet and mystic, facing a crisis of health and of faith. He tells the tale in scarcely more than one hundred eighty short pages, in language that is simple, athletic and (to echo one of the blurbs) luminous. We are taken into the cloister, an oasis of peace and prayer not too far from, but utterly untouched by, the sordor and agitation of the modern American megalopolis. We are taken into the prayer-life of Sister John, into her creative life via the poetry she composes, into her tense questionings as she faces her health-crisis, resolved as much to do God's will as to find out what that will is! We are taken -- very convincingly -- into the history of a vocation and into the history of a girlhood in which sadness is intermingled with a religious poet's wonder. And we are taken to the hospital. The keen sensory alertness of Mr Salzman's prose is a marvel. The language is spare and at the same time poetic, with the occasional felicitous metaphor that draws attention to itself only by being so effortlessly apt. Each of Sister John's fellow nuns has a personality that is recognizably human and recognizably imperfect. Most are endearing, commonsensical sorts; a few, well ... have a kind of brittle virtue. Doubt and faith, fear and joy, tension and serenity, spirit and body -- all these tensions exist in "Lying Awake." Our sole complaint about the novel is also our highest praise for it: it was far too short. We would have gladly stayed in the cloister for several hundred pages more!
Rating:
Summary: A small, flawless gem
Review: Mark Salzman is one of my absolute favourite authors. I bought a copy of _Lying_Awake_ when it was first published, but could not bring myself to read it, because after reading his other books, my expectations were so high that I was sure I would be disappointed. I carried the book along on several trips, and never opened it. Then on Wednesday night, I heard Salzman interviewed on Fresh air on NPR. Somehow, in listening to him talk about this book, I was inspired to break through my reluctance and read the book. I am very glad I did. I read it in great gulps, and then when I had finished, I turned back to the front of the book and read it again more slowly. The spare prose, almost perfect in its crystalline clarity, limns a story that breaks almost every rule of good fiction that I have ever heard. Which I suppose explains why the book works so beautifully. Almost completely circumscribed in setting and plot, with a theme as wide as the night sky, the book tackles universal truths. This book never proceeded as I expected, and it was always my expectations that were wrong. The ending of the book is breath-taking, which is an accomplishment in a work so adept and compelling. Mark Salzman says he is a slow. plodding writer. Perhaps he is right, but the diamonds he mines are more than worth the wait. It may be six years before he offers us another book. In the meantime, there is enough is this slim volume to occupy us until then.
| 
