I

IDENTITY CRISIS

Who are you, reader? A parent, a professional, a student, a child? Are you always yourself, or do you have two selves: one you show only to certain people, one you show to everyone else? Or do you feel that the “real” you has never seen the light of day at all?

Literature is stuffed to the gills with people having identity crises, whether through memory loss, psychiatric breakdown, or more inexplicable processes. The narrator of I’m Not Stiller, by the Swiss postwar writer Max Frisch, persistently denies accusations that he is the missing sculptor Anatol Stiller. And indeed, according to his passport, his name is James White. But friends, acquaintances, and even his wife repeatedly identify him as Stiller—a conundrum that confounds us as much as White (or should we say Stiller). As the truth gradually emerges, we are given a rare glimpse into the fragility of our relationship to ourselves.

Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances flips Frisch’s conceit. A psychiatrist in New York named Dr. Leo Liebenstein has convinced himself that his wife, Rema, has disappeared . . . and been replaced with an exact replica of herself. He doesn’t think he has an identity crisis; he thinks she does. In other words, he makes his crisis hers. “It was a little uncanny, the feeling I had, looking at that look-alike,” he muses. The “impostress,” as he calls her, continues to come to Leo’s home every day as if it were hers (which she maintains it is) and insists that she is the “missing” person. Leo refuses to believe her, even though she resembles his wife in every particular. She has the same “hayfeverishly fresh” shampoo, the “same baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, same tucking behind ears of dyed cornsilk blonde hair,” Leo concedes. “Same everything, but it wasn’t Rema. It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew.” Leo scours the streets of New York looking for the woman he believes has vanished, and when New York fails to produce her, he decides to journey to Argentina, her native land, and hunt for her in Patagonia. Galchen’s story is Borgesian and intriguing: it hints at the constructed nature of identity. On some level, all of us must invent who we are. And if the results don’t convince ourselves or others, we can labor to build a more satisfactory self.

If both of these novels suggest that it might be wise to carry more than a passport to identify yourself, Diego Marani’s New Finnish Grammar certainly ups the urgency of doing so. A man is found clubbed nearly to death in Trieste during the Second World War. The Finnish name tag on his clothes proclaims him to be Sampo Karjalainen, but when the man regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is—and no language. A Finnish doctor is among the passengers on the hospital ship where the man ends up, and he begins to rewire Finnish into the man’s brain, complete with its fiendishly complicated grammar and consonant-rich words. But what if this man wasn’t really Finnish in the first place? What will he become in a different language? What is it that makes him himself? In the end it’s the new relationships that he forges on the boat that reveal his identity to himself.

But if you are ever unlucky enough to lose your identity completely, the best cure you can get your pincers around is Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into a giant cockroach. He is disgusting not only to himself but to his entire family, and though Gregor tries to continue his life as it was before, it becomes increasingly difficult. Eating is challenging, communication impossible, basic hygiene ever more compromised. Gregor slowly sinks into an empty but peaceful, ruminative state as he starves to death.

Count your blessings that, even if you don’t know who you are, you are at least human. Admire your fingers, toes, the tip of your nose. Revel in the use of your limbs. Read the last paragraph of Kafka’s masterpiece aloud, and enjoy the fact that your voice is not the terrifying rasping of an insect. Celebrate your humanity—whoever it may belong to.

See also: Identity, unsure of your reading

READING AILMENT Identity, unsure of your reading

CURE Create a favorites shelf

If you feel you have forgotten—or perhaps you have never known—what sort of books are your sort of books, and as a result find yourself unable to choose what to read next, we suggest that you keep a favorites shelf. Select ten books that fill you with warmth, nostalgia, a flutter of nervous excitement. If some of these are favorites from your childhood, all the better. Make these, the ones that beckon you, your standard. Put them on a special shelf in the room in which you tend to do your reading or where you will pass them every day. If possible, reread them (or at least parts of them). They will remind you of what you love most in literature, and—if your reading life has been rich—of who you are. Next time you feel unsure of what to read next, use your favorites shelf as a guide and gentle nudge to your literary soul. It will tell you the answers to questions you didn’t even know you had.

IDIOT, FEELING LIKE AN

The room goes quiet, and you find yourself the focus of a sea of faces. It dawns on you that you’re the only one who doesn’t understand what’s wrong with what you’ve just said. Then someone starts to laugh, and one by one the others join in. You feel a hot flush take over your face (see: Blushing), followed by a blood-draining sense of shame (see: Shame). They’re not laughing with you, but at you.

We’ve all been there. Feeling like an idiot is almost as inevitable as falling in love. In fact, being an idiot is not necessarily a bad thing.* The gentle prince Lev Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot is an idiot in a social rather than an intellectual sense, standing outside society because he has no comprehension of its mechanisms: money, status, small talk, the subtle intricacies of daily life are all obscure to him. But when we readers think about Prince Lev, it is not with any sense of disparagement, but with absolute fondness and love. Indeed, everyone who encounters the prince in the novel is both exasperated by him and deeply enamored of his profound understanding of a version of reality that most of us do not see.

Next time the room falls silent around you, remember the prince. Look everyone back in the eye, and anticipate affection instead. You’ll probably get it.

See also: Failure, feeling like a

IGNORANCE

See: Homophobia • Idiot, feeling like an • Racism • Xenophobia

INDECISION

Are you inclined to get yourself tied up in knots whenever you are called upon to make a decision? Do you see things from everybody else’s point of view except your own? Do you drive yourself and your friends crazy as you bounce between a plethora of paths, unable to choose or commit to any one of them? If so, you are not alone. You’re suffering from the quintessential ailment of our age: indecisiveness. Because never before has there been more choice—and yet never have we been more paralyzed.

Dwight Wilmerding, the twenty-eight-year-old slacker hero of Ben Kunkel’s novel Indecision, finds that he can’t “think of the future until [he’s] arrived there”—a quality shared by many indecisive types. Underemployed, halfhearted about his girlfriend Vaneetha, he makes decisions on whether or not to accept invitations by flipping a coin—the only way to ensure that his “whole easy nature” doesn’t end up seeing him doing everybody else’s bidding. Meanwhile, decisions continue to be made for him. His employers at the pharmaceutical company where he works give him the boot, and when his old school friend Natasha invites him—in a suggestive sort of way—to join her in Ecuador, he goes. And, unsurprisingly, when his friend Dan offers him a new trial drug, Abulinix, which promises to cure him of his indecision, he embraces the gemlike blue capsule. Only after gleefully ingesting it is he told that it has some interesting side effects: satyriasis, or an excessive desire in males to copulate, and potentiating alcohol, meaning that once in the bloodstream, one drink becomes two.

Perhaps because of the wonder drug, or perhaps not, things take quite a turn in Ecuador. Even better than Natasha, he finds the beautiful and highly politicized Brigid, who speaks in alluringly foreign tones. Whether it is the Abulinix or the psyche-altering hallucinogenic they take in the jungle—or, in fact, a fundamental shift of consciousness—Dwight begins to make proactive choices for the first time in his life.

Take this novel with you, go find your Abulinix and/or your Brigid and/or your jungle drug equivalent, and be prepared to wake up to a newly decisive life. Or, on the other hand, don’t.

See also: Starting, fear of • Vacation, not knowing what novels to take on

INDIFFERENCE

See: Apathy

INFATUATION

There is nothing so heady, so sweet, or so intoxicating as being in the throes of a serious crush. Whoever your love object, to be lost in the admiration of a fellow being is one of the most absorbing and deliriously pleasurable ways to lose great chunks of your life. But for all the pleasure of this state, there is a price to pay. The love object may well not feel the same way, for one thing. And by its very nature, infatuation is blind to practicalities. It is an unreasoned, extravagant love, feeding off itself more than off the returned affections of the love recipient (see also: Love, unrequited). And though not as dangerous as obsession, it can be a precursor to this state, rendering the sufferer incapable of seeing his or her own folly and the inadequacies of his or her object.

Cocteau’s enigmatic little novel is a paradigm of intoxication. It illustrates a perfectly puzzling love maze, in which a brother and sister score points by transferring their infatuation with each other to other young men and women, then back again. Paul and Elisabeth nurse their mother in a Parisian apartment with one huge room (rather like a stage). Eventually, they are left alone there, with their imaginations and neuroses to grow like hothouse flowers. At school, Paul had been infatuated with Dargelos, a beautiful boy who threw a snowball at him with a stone inside it. This sends the delicate Paul to bed for several weeks, where as an invalid enjoying the “sweet delights of sickness,” he learns to love his sister a little too much. On recovery he meets Agathe (who closely resembles Dargelos), and Paul transfers his infatuation to her. Meanwhile, Paul and Elisabeth have perfected “the Game,” a means of deepening their relationship by wounding each other in a series of circling conversational attacks. As their mutual infatuation becomes more extreme, they withdraw from the world into a make-believe existence where all that matters is the Game.

It cannot but end badly—it is all too heady, too intense, and prismatically refractive. And it’s only a matter of time before we hear the shatter. If you are in the throes of a similarly intense infatuation, switch the object of your fascination from life to the page. Cocteau was known in artistic circles of his time (whose members included Picasso, Modigliani, Proust, and Gide) as the “frivolous prince,” and inspired infatuation many times himself. His sensual prose and mercurial imagination are equally ravishing. He wrote Les Enfants Terribles during a period of withdrawal from opium, and you can feel the call of the author’s blood for the drug in each heightened sentence. “The world owes its enchantment to . . . curious creatures and their fancies,” he muses. “Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.”

Don’t let yourself be blown to perdition by currents of whimsical desire. The pleasure to be found in aesthetic heights will last forever; your mortal crush will not.

See also: Disenchantment • Lovesickness • Lust • Obsession

INNOCENCE, LOSS OF

Breathe a sigh of relief: Hester Prynne, the disgraced unmarried mother of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, is dead. That is to say, she never existed, of course, being fictional. And the misfortune of being vilified as Hester was—for having a baby but no wedding ring—is much rarer today than it was when Hester’s woeful story took place four centuries ago. The current age is, on the whole, a better moment for the cheeky “sadder but wiser” girl who is as good, or as bad, as she wants to be and doesn’t spend much time worrying what church elders might think of her behavior.

Still, if you’ve been fretting remorsefully that you’re naughtier than most or if you’re pining for the simplicity of your younger, better-behaved years, read Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie to remind yourself why you shouldn’t (necessarily) bemoan your experience or give too much thought to what others think of your conduct. Dreiser’s flowing, disapproving sermon of a novel about a girl who leaves rural Wisconsin and goes to Chicago (and, later, New York) to make something of herself will likely make your blood boil, stirring you to defend assertive women and giving you strength to flout the opinion of moralizers who would pin your wings.

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things,” Dreiser warns. “Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” Oh, puh-leeze. Dreiser’s writing is so beguiling and enveloping, and so fascinatingly evocative of a now vanished social world, that you will get sucked into his storytelling and want to read every page to see how Carrie’s reinvention progresses. But unlike the author, you will likely applaud his heroine’s transformation into a more interesting, audacious, fulfilled person. As a star of the New York stage rather than an unremarkable chaste drudge on a nameless farm, Carrie inarguably become less pure, but who can blame her?

For another take, read Jeannette Walls’s gutsy and refreshingly pragmatic novel Half-Broke Horses. Rosemary escapes hardscrabble beginnings to become a teacher and daredevil horse racer on ranches in the American West. Her sister, Helen, is prettier but has less self-confidence. While struggling to make it as an actress in California, Helen succumbs to the wiles of a “series of cads.” Worrying that her sister is headed down the wrong path, Rosemary writes letters to her, “warning her not to count on men to take care of her and to come up with a fallback plan.” When, as Rosemary has foreseen, Helen gets pregnant, she runs to her sister’s side, despairing at her ruined reputation. Watching her sister’s tear-streaked face as she sleeps, Rosemary has no inclination to blame her for her lost innocence: she thinks she looks “like an angel, a slightly bloated, pregnant angel, but an angel nonetheless.” Rosemary rejects the idea that loss of innocence is an irrecoverable tragedy; but Helen is much harder on herself, with tragic consequences. Reading about the attitudes of these sisters will show you the error of judging yourself or others too harshly for the messy missteps that we humans—male and female—so often make; simple accidents that don’t deserve the brand of “shame.”

INSANITY

See: Madness

INSOMNIA

Everyone suffers from insomnia occasionally. But if you suffer from it nightly, it can wreak havoc on your relationship, your career, and your ability to get through the day. It traps you in a vicious circle, the problem feeding on itself. As your level of exasperation rises with your accumulating fatigue, nothing is more likely to stop you from sleeping than the anxiety that you might not be able to sleep.

Insomniacs often turn to reading as a way to endure those lonely wee hours. We heartily agree that there is no better way to spend this otherwise wasted time. Jonathan Coe’s The House of Sleep is one invaluable tool for exploring your sleeplessness, but it should not be read at night unless you are prepared to accept that you will be up until dawn—despite its title, the novel is far from peaceful. Pick it up during the day, when you are wide awake and prepared for a thorough analysis of why you can’t get to sleep.

The novel is divided into six parts, each representing the various stages of sleep, and follows four loosely connected characters who each have a different issue with sleep. Sarah is a narcoleptic whose dreams are so vivid that she can’t tell the difference between them and real life. Terry, a budding film critic, sleeps a minimum of fourteen hours a day because he is addicted to dreams of such “near-paradisal loveliness.” Gregory, Sarah’s boyfriend, becomes a psychiatrist at a sleep clinic and begins self-experimenting with sleeplessness for scientific purposes, believing it to be a disease that must be conquered. Robert—at first seemingly the most normal of the four—becomes so obsessed with Sarah that he puts himself through a dramatic transformation in order to inveigle his way into her life, and bed. With lustrous technical detail sure to fascinate the sleep deprived, this novel may offer some ideas for practical cures as well.

The novel to reach for in those restless hours, on the other hand, is The Book of Disquiet, the plotless journal of Bernardo Soares, assistant accountant at Vasques and Co. on the Rua dos Douradores—a job “about as demanding as an afternoon nap.” Soares both despairs and celebrates the monotony of his humdrum life because he recognizes that everything he thinks and feels exists only as a “negation of and flight from” his job. And what thoughts and feelings they are! Because Soares, a man in possession of a face so bland that it causes him terrible dismay when he sees it in an office photograph, is a dreamer, his attention always divided by what is actually going on and the flights of fancy in his head.

For his disappointment in himself, his dreaminess, his constantly breaking heart, it’s impossible not to fall in love with Soares. Quiet, unobtrusive, plaintive, constantly drowsy, a man who, though prone to nostalgia and bouts of desolation, is not immune to joy, he is the perfect nighttime companion. Pondering whether life is in fact “the waking insomnia of [our] dreams,” Soares thinks a lot about sleep—in fact, he barely discriminates between sleeping and wakefulness.

Besides all this, nowhere in literature are the rhythms of prose more attuned to the lumbering gait of the sleepless hours. If your eyelids start to droop as you read, Soares won’t mind. You can pick up your conversation with him, wherever you left off, tomorrow night.

See also: Depression, general • Exhaustion • Irritability • Stress • Tired and emotional, being

INTERNET ADDICTION

What have we become? We are a race that sits, by our millions, for hours and days and years on end, gazing in solitary rapture at our screens, lost to a netherworld of negligible reality. Even though we may get up from time to time to eat, sleep, make love, or have a cup of coffee, our computers and smartphones call to us like sirens to come back, interact, update, reload. Like moths drawn to brightness and warmth, we seem unable to resist—even though our eyes are strained, our backs are sore, and our ability to focus is shorn. Sometimes it can seem as if life is more compelling on our screens than off them.

Our cure for this most deplorable of modern ailments is one that will require you to turn your back on life for a few hours more: the mystical, delightfully eccentric John Cowper Powys novel Wolf Solent. Set in a West Country already familiar to fans of Thomas Hardy, it is a densely written—but worthwhile—tome. Once you discover JCP, as we shall call him, you’ll want to chuck your monitor into the nearest Dumpster and go and live out the rest of your days among the birds and the bees.

Wolf Solent opens with the eponymous hero—an unprepossessing thirty-five-year-old with “goblinish” features—making an escape from London, where he’s been chained to a dull teaching job for ten years. He’s returning to the town of his childhood, where he will reconnect with his own “furtive inner life.” At Wolf’s core is what he calls his “personal mythology,” a sort of mystical place he goes to connect with nature, and from the moment he catches his first whiff, from the train, of the smells of a Dorset spring morning—fresh green shoots, muddy ditches, primroses on a grassy bank—his “real life” begins again. He experiences what he describes as an “intoxicating enlargement of personality” that draws its power from nature itself.

It’s heady stuff—and becomes more so. Soon after Wolf arrives and takes up his new job as researcher for the malicious squire Urquhart, he falls in love with two women at once: the “maddeningly desirable” Gerda, who can imitate the song of a blackbird, and Christie, who shares his passion for books. As Wolf struggles to find a way to love them both, he chases after the bodily sensations that make him feel alive. It’s impossible to resist his raw, ecstatic response to the natural world, and through his eyes you will come to see the animal energy in other people. As a way of rediscovering how to live in the world again—sensually, sexually, with the full engagement of mind and body—it can’t be beaten. And perhaps, like Wolf, being surrounded by all that vegetable efflorescence will soothe your eyes, strengthen your back, and, most crucially, return your fractured brain to full capacity.

See also: Antisocial, being • Concentrate, inability to

IRRITABILITY

Where someone is being irritable, you can be sure there’s another, unexpressed emotion lurking, iceberglike, beneath the surface.

In The Blackwater Lightship, Irish writer Colm Tóibín dissects the bitterness and hurt that have set in between three generations of narrator Helen’s family—grandmother Mrs. Devereux, mother Lily, and daughter Helen—since Helen’s father died many years earlier.

When Helen hears that her brother Declan is dying of AIDS, she has to break the news to their estranged mother, Lily. And when they decide to take Declan to their grandmother’s house in Blackwater, Helen is thrust back into a world she had hoped never to revisit. The knives are out between Lily and Helen before they’ve even arrived, and once they are all shut up in the small, stuffy house, the barbed comments really start flying. Amid their petty accusations and bitter recollections, Declan lies dying, the catalyst of all their arguments, yet the only one not drawn in. Luckily, Declan’s two loyal friends are present—the talkative Larry, the coolly direct Paul—who take the women aside, one by one, and encourage them to vent their feelings. By the end of the novel, all involved have a much clearer understanding of one another’s grievances.

Don’t wait for a crisis to force your irritability to the surface. If you or someone you know is prone to irritation, invite a couple of patient, understanding friends into the mix and talk your icebergs out of the water.

See also: Anger • Dissatisfaction • Grumpiness • Querulousness

IRRITABLE BOWEL SYNDROME

See: Constipation • Diarrhea • Nausea • Pain, being in

ITCHY FEET

The urge to be constantly on the move is both virtue and folly. While we may gain insight and maturity from constant change and new experiences, we risk polluting our fragile environment and becoming a stone that has gathered no moss. For how do we build a life in multiple places? One needs to commit to a place in order to put down roots (see also: Commitment, fear of), fertilize relationships, and come into flower. To soothe and still your itchy feet, therefore, we recommend a chapter of The Odyssey every morning, taken after your shower and before your breakfast. It will invigorate your circulation and satiate your desire for travel.

Odysseus himself is an inveterate sufferer of itchy feet. King of Ithaca, he left his island home ten years before the action begins, in order to fight the Trojan War. Now he sets off back to Penelope, his wife, and his small but significant sovereignty. But it’ll be another decade before he feels the soil of Ithaca under his well-worn sandals. He is held captive for years by the sea nymph Calypso. The Cyclops Polyphemus keeps him in a cave, along with his men and ovine herd, for some time before Odysseus cunningly blinds his jailer. He is regularly at the mercy of an enraged Poseidon, who sends storms that wash him and his crew up on the island of Circe, where they are all turned temporarily into pigs.

But, frankly, the gods alone cannot be blamed for all his meanderings. Many of his diversions are self-induced—such as when Odysseus foolishly shouts his name to Polyphemus, triggering Poseidon’s pursuit of him in the first place. In the end, after twenty years of tardiness, Odysseus returns just in time to save his wife from an enforced remarriage.

Don’t let your life go by in your absence. By the time you finish reading this ancient epic, meandering in its adventures but introspective in nature, you will have had enough vicarious travels to last a lifetime. Now get on with life in the place where you are.

See also: Dissatisfaction • Happiness, searching for • Jump ship, desire to • Wanderlust

ITCHY TEETH

If you’ve never even heard of this ailment, you’ve clearly never met the long-suffering hero of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King. Because Gene Henderson—a fifty-five-year-old millionaire with big, “blustering” ways, a large nose, and more children than he can remember the names of—has had itchy teeth all his life. In fact, all his pain, physical and emotional (and there’s a lot of it), congregates in his teeth. When he’s angry, his gums ache. When he’s faced with heartbreaking beauty, his teeth itch. And when his wives, his girls, his children, his farm, his animals, his habits, his money, his violin lessons, his drunkenness, his brutality, his hemorrhoids, his fainting fits, his face, his soul, and—yes—his teeth all start giving him grief at once, he decides to gate-crash his friend Charlie’s honeymoon in Africa, and from there go “in country,” to find himself.

It doesn’t work. What he finds is the same blustering fifty-five-year-old millionaire he left behind. And what’s more, while he’s away he breaks the bridge at the side of his mouth, ruining many dollars worth of complicated dentistry and leaving him spitting fragments of artificial molar into his hand.

Itchy teeth is a rare complaint, but it has its sufferers—and not just in Bellow novels. Those afflicted experience almost unbearable torment. The only thing that can drive a person madder than the itch of the teeth itself is having everyone else doubt their dental woes. This uproarious battering ram of a novel will elicit sympathy for those afflicted at last.