A memoir of Hayes’ surpassingly tender and exuberant romance with Sacks in his last seven years of life, it is also a book about the necessity of self-reinvention ... The excerpts from this journal that appear in Insomniac City capture the neurologist’s exquisitely memorable way of saying things, which made one wish that one was always carrying a tape recorder in his presence ... Much of the loveliest writing in the book, however, belongs to Hayes alone...Ultimately, what makes a memoir worth reading is its acuity of observation, and Hayes is a 21st century flaneur — like Whitman or Baudelaire with a digital camera and an insatiable appetite for the serendipitous connections that thrive in liminal places like the subway ... Like Patti Smith’s haunting M Train, Hayes’ book weaves seemingly disparate threads of memory into a kind of sanctuary — a secret place where one can shake off the treasured relics of past lives and prepare to be reborn anew.
Read just 50 pages, and you’ll see easily enough how Hayes is Sacks’s logical complement. Though possessed of different temperaments, both are alive to difference, variety, the possibilities of our rangy humanity; both are avid chroniclers of our species — Sacks in his case studies, and Hayes in his character sketches of the people he meets in the street. Hayes is a true flâneur, a man who actively engages the city with all of his senses ... I adore this observation. Yet readers should be warned: Hayes’s writing can also be terribly precious ... Hayes’s poetry is pedestrian, but his street photographs are not. They are frank, beautiful, bewitching — they unmask their subjects’ best and truest selves. And his account of Sacks’s final months will no doubt inspire many readers.
Although Hayes and Sacks never married, the charming, intimate portrait that emerges earns a place on the shelf of moving spousal tributes ... Hayes wisely jotted down snippets of their conversations, which reveal the probing and often unexpected trajectory of Sacks' thoughts ... Insomniac City teems with sweet, unguarded moments ... Hayes' touching portrait of Sacks' last years is the main attraction here. His offbeat urban cameos reveal a remarkable openness, but can come across as subtly condescending, precious, or even grating, however well-intended ... Nonetheless, Hayes emerges as an unusually kind, caring man.
The author is very good about the day-to-day life of the couple, giving us their routines of food, music, affection and sleep. The best details are from his journal, where Sacks is called O ... Throughout the book, Hayes includes portraits of New York strangers: skateboarders, cabdrivers, people met on the subway, the dealer at their local newsstand. There’s an innocent 'gee whiz' quality to his writing here that some readers will find charming, but these characters are pale distractions in comparison with Sacks; a little of them goes a long way. We end the book hungry to know more about the good doctor. His death is still recent, and Hayes probably needed more time to bring his memories of the man into sharper focus. What’s gained in immediacy is lost in weight. Sacks comes across as a gentle, learned, highly eccentric academic, but he was so much more. If you haven’t read any of his books, you would never know what an extraordinary talent he was: cerebral, tender, alien, mysterious.
Their relationship is charming and charmed — words here stripped clean and in amplitude. Sacks is murderously shy, and to witness how he emerges from this cocoon is wonderful ... You both read and watch, from Hayes many portraits, the vanishing of Oliver. He is such a brick...And Hayes is a brick, too. There, and aware that he had not only fallen in love, 'it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him.' It’s the kind of adoration that glows invitingly, like a warm, lighted window passed on a nighttime walk through a sleeping city.
... a love letter to Sacks, but also to New York ... The book is what’s called 'reader-friendly,' that is, there’s lots of white space, plenty of photos and not too many long grey columns of type. Overheard remarks, curious reflections by Sacks, poetic observations keep the narrative moving along. Hayes is the poetic sort of guy who might mention he’s just seen fireflies in the city; Sacks is the sort of science nerd who warns that if you swallow more than three fireflies you might die from luciferase.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
