Know the night

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. An unforgettable, moving and beautifully written memoir on isolation, human connection and love, that will draw in readers of Annie Dillard and Joan Didion.

For about two years, Maria Mutch's son Gabriel, who is severely autistic and has Down's syndrome, slept very little. In her incisive and poetic memoir, Maria shares the intensely personal challenges and revelations brought about by this period. As a baby, Gabriel's first words and affinity for sign language enthralled his adoring parents. When these words fell away, and his medical diagnoses multiplied, Maria committed herself entirely to Gabe's care. As his sleeping hours dwindled, care took place within an isolated, wakeful, often frightening world in which Maria's desire for connection and meaning expanded. She became fascinated with stories of Antarctic exploration, and found a companion in Admiral Richard Byrd, an explorer who lived by himself in the polar darkness for months in 1934 and later wrote about his struggle for survival in a book called Alone .
Re-imagining Byrd's story and interweaving it with her own, Maria illuminates a search for love and understanding against the terrors of the unknown that will resonate with anyone who has lain awake in the dark, or longed to protect a loved one . Know the Night is a powerful journey into the mysteries of the night and the human mind, and a testament to the extraordinary bond between mother and child.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

During the two years her autistic son Gabriel-who was born with Downs Syndrome, later diagnosed with Autism, and does not speak--cycled through repetitive behaviors, refusing to sleep, soiling himself, and becoming a "cyclone" of inarticulate sounds, Canadian poet Mutch experienced a dark night of the soul. She compares the claustrophobia to the four months American explorer Richard Byrd spent in an Antarctic hut in 1934, slowly being poisoned by carbon monoxide. Her reflections on Byrd's expedition, Camus' 1942 essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," Van Gogh's "shattered mind," as well as the rhythmic, improvisational jazz that calms Gabriel transform Mutch's memoir of raising a child with Down Syndrome into a meditation on the effects of silence, isolation, and unusual forms of rescue. Mutch, who now lives with her family in Rhode Island, presents her nighttime vigils as solitary odysseys into the depths of her son's perception of the world. With the exact perception only a parent offers, she suggests that Gabriel is in fact a sorcerer, wizard, and puzzle casting a spell over her. Her wise reading of his motivations and thoughts on the existential meaning of his condition create a compassionate picture of his world. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Mutch's eldest son, Gabriel, was born with Down syndrome and then, as a toddler, lost his words and developed behavior that led to a diagnosis of autism as well. For a period of two years as a young teenager, Gabriel also lost the night, waking at all hours and requiring continuous attention between midnight and six a.m. Viewing Gabriel through the shadow of night, Mutch became interested to the point of obsession with explorer Richard Byrd and his solitary experiences in the long Antarctic night. As she recounts Gabriel's love of jazz and their nighttime visits to area clubs, she ruminates on the mysteries of the music's rhythms and the solace it provides her mysterious son. In this poetic, elegant, and intense account, Mutch quietly writes of nights filled with confusion and chaos, and deep, unfulfilled wishes to understand. Saving Gabriel, she explains, is no simple thing; it requires a sustained rescue. This is her record of that rescue, the endless determination of parents to see their complicated child.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2014 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

An unhappy yet hopeful story of "a sleepless parent [and] a wordless child." In a poetic, entrancing voice, debut author Mutch chronicles how she and her autistic son, who also has Down syndrome, endured a two-year stretch of not sleeping through the night. She shepherded nonverbal 9-year-old Gabriel through his episodes of shrieks and noisesduring which the tenderhearted, jazz-loving boy she adored vanishedand struggled to make sense of his confounding behavior. She desperately wanted to understand what Gabriel was "communicating" through these outbursts, but she was unable to break the code. Luckily for him, her husband slept through most of these chaotic episodes (their younger child is also a minor character in this tale), casting the author as the heroine looking to pierce Gabriel's impenetrable outer self. Readers experience Mutch's dazed state of mind as she relates her dreamlike memories, which give her memoir a novelistic tone; she tells of "hospital corridors blank as laundry chutes" and laments that "there is no sorcery for the problem" she faced. During this period, the author repeatedly read Adm. Robert Byrd's memoir detailing his six months alone during the Antarctic winter in 1934. She explores her son's silences and attendant nightly shrieks as Byrd did the perpetual night of the frozen, uncharted polar territory, and she regards his experiences as "correlative with the psychic regions where I've been stumbling." This kinship eventually hijacks her own story, possibly since his adventures offered an exciting respite to her son's nightly shouting, which, no matter her steadfastness, made her delirious. Further, the foreshadowing and imagined significance of events before this period try the patience of readers eager for the story to move toward its conclusion. Mutch's story is absorbing and creatively rendered, but the central mystery remains.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.