Wolf Moon by Arifa Akbar is a book I wanted to like. Its central question — “What does it mean to be a woman in the night?” — serves as a loose thread binding together memoir, cultural criticism and feminist theory.
Akbar’s experiences of menopausal insomnia lead into analyses of Louise Bourgeois’s night drawings and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Visits to her father’s care home are interwoven with eerie Pakistani folktales he once told her. She interviews night-shift workers, dancers in Lahore and security guards. She drifts through galleries, goes clubbing and attends late-night films.
There’s a perceptive reading of Henri Fuseli’s The Nightmare, as well as some evocative descriptions of David Lynch scenes. The cultural references are obvious and a little self-consciously tasteful, but they are handled deftly. This is, unmistakably, a serious and intelligent book.
Still, the cumulative effect is deadening.
The problem isn’t the material, which is often fascinating, but Akbar’s compulsive need to filter it through the dull strainer of introspective autotheory. Entire pages are padded with limp self-reflection — “I think back to” “I felt” “I wondered” — until the prose begins to sag under the weight of its own inwardness.
The analytical intensity is often laughably disproportionate to the life being examined: “I put a notebook beside my bed. I open it up the next morning. I write a few words down, but I am left straining for more.”
There’s also a wearying performance of liberal empathy. When she encounters sex workers dancing in Amsterdam’s red-light district, she rushes to ally herself with them, as though fending off imagined accusations. “I feel horrified,” she declares at a Jack the Ripper tour. “I was in awe of her fortitude,” she writes of a security guard at her theatre, then asks, “How did Maria remain invisible to me?” I am naturally distrustful of anyone so easily scandalised.
Again and again, moments that might have thrummed with tension are robbed of all charge. We don’t just hear that she went to Berghain; we’re told what Berghain is, then led through one of the tamest nights in club history. Not her fault, but it’s hard to be invested in such a safe and orderly life. A book about night, yes, but drained of its Dionysian wildness.
