Beyond Sleep

Beyond Sleep (Dutch: Nooit meer slapen) is a novel by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans, published in February 1966. The protagonist, Dutch geologist Alfred Issendorf, has a geology dissertation in preparation, and embarks on an expedition to Finnmark, northern Norway, to verify his dissertation director's theory that craters in the local landscape were formed by meteor impacts rather than by Ice Age glaciers. Initially he is accompanied by a group of three Norwegian students of geology, but soon after two travel their own course Alfred loses his guide Arne, who falls to his death, and is then on his own in a land where the sun never sets.

Beyond Sleep is one of the canonical novels of the Dutch postwar period, and a prime example of what is perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the author's work, the intense cohesion between theme and narrative strategy.

Alfred Issendorf, a geology student from Amsterdam, has received a grant to do field work in Finnmark, Norway, attempting to verify his professor's theory that meteors have impacted the area, leaving telltale craters. His professor, Sibbelee, has written the Norwegian professor Nummedal (his own former dissertation director) to ask for aerial photographs of the area, but when Issendorf meets Nummedal in Oslo the latter knows nothing of any photographs (and scoffs at the meteor theory); if they exist, he says, they may be at the Geological Survey in Trondheim, with a Professor Hvalbiff. In Trondheim, however, no Hvalbiff is present, and the unfinished office buildings are in disarray--quickly it turns out that no aerial photographs are here, and later Issendorf discovers that Hvalbiff ("whale meat") was probably a derogatory name for the director, Oftedahl.

Without photographs, and now sleep-deprived because of his anxieties and the lack of darkness at night, Issendorf travels on to Tromsø, and thence to Alta, in Finnmark. There, he meets up with Arne, an old geology acquaintance who is also there for fieldwork, and then with two more students, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen. With two tents, tinned meat, and boxes of knekkebrød, the four set out for the interior, a rather bleak, uninhabited, and mosquito-infested area. One of their camps is under the mountain Vuorje, at a lake where they fish for trout. Issendorf, who does not get along with Qvigstad and Mikkelsen, sleeps poorly and spends much of his time in gloomy thoughts, feeling unable to measure up to his father and even to Arne, and wondering whether ancient resentment between Sibbelee, Oftedahl, and Nummedal is to blame for making his mission impossible.