Beyond Sleep

Alfred Issendorf sets out for Finnmark in the far north of Norway to locate meteor craters for his doctoral thesis, working from photographs and a theory borrowed partly from his own dead father, a renowned scientist whose reputation Alfred has spent his career trying to live up to without ever matching. Hermans stacks the deck against him from the packing list forward: the wrong maps, borrowed equipment that doesn't fit the terrain, a camera that turns out to have no film in it, so the expedition is compromised before anyone has walked a single mile.

The international team Alfred joins, Norwegian, Swedish, and Irish researchers who share the trek but not his sense of mission, treat the search with a professional detachment Alfred can't manage, and the gap between his private, almost religious investment in finding the craters and his colleagues' shrugging competence becomes the novel's real comedy: everyone else is just doing a job, and Alfred alone has made the outcome a referendum on his entire worth as a person and as his father's son.

Sleep deprivation, present from the title onward, functions less as physical detail than as narrative logic: Alfred's judgment erodes across the trek in ways he can't track from inside his own exhaustion, and Hermans lets the prose itself go slightly unreliable along with him, small errors and misreadings accumulating the way they would in an overtired mind, until the reader trusts Alfred's account of events noticeably less by the book's second half than its first.

Late in the trek, a companion fires a rifle shot at what he claims was a bear, and the incident, ambiguous, possibly a genuine threat, possibly a symptom of the whole party's fraying nerve, becomes the closest the novel comes to real physical danger without ever confirming whether the danger was real. Hermans refuses to resolve it, and the refusal fits a novel built entirely around the gap between what a rational scientific expedition believes it's tracking and what its exhausted members actually experience out on the tundra.