| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Witty and Sophisticated Masterpiece of Satire,
This review is from: The House of Sleep (Paperback)
I just finished reading this book and find myself quite simply having to write something about it. An absolutely superlative exercise in plot manipulation, it succeeds at almost every twist and turn, at times eliciting laughter, at others shock, sadness and finally, true romantic empathy in the least likely of ways. At the core of this novel is the connection between the 'real' and the 'imaginary' and the interplay between these different levels of consciousness through the passage of time. This novel is certainly reminiscent of Nabokov, and I would even venture to say Proust, in style and wit. Readers of Nabokov will also discern a certain similarity in the approach to multilayered realities, the world of dreams, and the ultimate joke unfolding as the narrative progesses-- Ada, being the closest novel I can think of. All this AND and extemely entertaining read! I recommend this book most enthusiastically, the only proviso being that it might induce insomnia on the part of the reader due to its highly addictive qualities ...
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
House of Sleep,
By Matt Musselman (Burnaby, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The House of Sleep (Paperback)
The House of Sleep is with little doubt the most painstakingly constructed, carefully orchestrated work of fiction I've read. Similar efforts at formulaic writing are usually clever at best, or a mockery of themselves at worst, but Jonathan Coe has pulled off such a design with ingenuity and to great effect. On its surface, the story is not too striking, hence the reason I was not at first interested by reviews and comments. A group of students, each bearing a heavy burden of intriguing personality quirks and neuroses, meet while living in the same dormitory house, to find that twelve years later, their lives are still intricately related. Beautiful and fragile Sarah, a narcoleptic, has dreams so vivid that she (and by persuasion, sometimes others) mistake them for reality. Robert, a tortured individual who desparately loves her, can never seem to be the right person for her at the right moment. Terry, their friend, spends half his life in search of a lost Italian film, for which there's no evidence aside from a single photograph, to which references appear at odd times in others' dreams. Other characters include Ruby, the groundskeepers' daughter who has discovered that "people never lie when talking in their sleep," and Gregory, Sarah's first lover, who harbors an unnatural obsession with watching Sarah sleep. The cunning presentation of the novel, however, consists of its being told in two times at once, the early 80s and the mid 90s, but both in a chronological fashion, such that experiences in the past which trigger occurrences in the present and present revelations about past events occur in quick succession. Carefully placed epiphanies mark each chapter like milestones on the way through the plot of the book. The author also makes very adept use of varied narrative technique, including letters, transcripts, journal articles, along with characters' verbose descriptions of events, dreams, and memories, to add variety and strength to the writing. At the end of the novel, a collage of a poem (tidbits of which were scattered throughout the novel, as its author constructed it in his head), a letter, and a transcript provide a far more powerful depiction of denoument events than any narration alone could accomplish. The book is at times haunting, hypnotic, viciously humorous, and unceasingly disturbing, and forgiving a slightly melodramatic turn of events at its climax, serves as an extraordinary work of fiction.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
won't put you to sleep...,
By
This review is from: The House of Sleep (Paperback)
This is the second novel by this young Brit, and if this book is any indication, he should be writing intelligent, thoughtful, humorous novels for some time. It's my intention to pick up his first novel (once I have time to read it, that is). "The House of Sleep" is a novel about dreams and obsessions, about sleeping and waking and how vital they are. The book has an interesting style, it is about four students who knew each other (some well, some just as passing acquaintences) in college, who all wind up coming back to the old house that served as student housing 12 years ago which is now a sleep-disorder clinic. The chapters switch off, the odd-numbered ones take place in the present and the even-numbered ones take place in the past - or is it the other way around? At any rate, I felt this might get confusing but it was quite naturally done. The problems of narcolepsy, and of a man who hasn't slept for the better part of 12 years, plus two other men with strange obsessions, don't sound like they would be part of a very funny novel, but parts of this book were so funny I was practically crying. The chapter about the "business success seminar" was utterly hilarious. The characters were likeable, for the most part, and well drawnand well-realized whether you found them likeable or not. The lyrical writing, the use of similar and repetitive language, and the many-layered plot contrived to form a compelling and enjoyable novel. And even though I saw the ending coming from about the middle of the book, its impact was not lessened. The coda, in the form of three brief appendices, was absolutely breathtaking. Highly recommended!
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
See all 13 books this book cites
See all 19 books citing this book
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
|
|
