University Libraries Promotion and Tenure Recognition

This small miracle of a book focuses on the first moments of consciousness of a woman waking from sleep. When it appeared in 1981, the New York Times called Eva Figes’ Waking "a successful response to Shakespeare's equally fatalistic description of the seven ages for men in As You Like It." I see it as akin to Virginia Woolf's masterpiece The Waves which shows the complex evolution of personalities and characters by examining pertinent details. Figes references major life events—love affairs, marriage, the birth of children, one’s own impending death—in passing, much as Woolf does in To the Lighthouse. Waking refuses conventional “plot.” Quite literally, nothing happens here. The protagonist doesn’t move, doesn’t leave her bed, for the entire book. What advances the story is the narrator’s growing understanding of herself as she mulls over her surroundings and what has brought her to a particular place at a particular time. When I took Waking off my bookshelf just now, I found the page marker I used when I read the book for the first time: a March, 1985 receipt from Sears, showing the purchase of towels and a shower curtain for our faculty apartment at Western Carolina University, where I had my first teaching job. I must have bought Waking at Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, then our refuge an hour away where, in the time before amazon.com, we discovered interesting new books just by browsing the shelves, our two-year-old happily occupying himself in the children’s section. Even then, I recognized that the book opened a door for me as a fiction writer. Waking gave me permission to approach plot in a way that I’d always been told was incorrect, though I didn’t know how to write any other way. The ghost of linear development supported a story conveyed through deep immersion in detail and thought. Waking woke me up. By being available at Pattee, perhaps this extraordinary book will wake another young writer.