The House of Sleep [Hardcover]

Jonathan Coe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 1998

A dream of a novel."
--Erica Wagner, The Times (London)

Following The Winshaw Legacy--Coe's ecstatically reviewed American debut, winner of the John Lewellyn Rhys Prize in England and France's coveted Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger--comes this beguiling, eccentric entertainment.
        Ashdown--a vast clifftop manor on the English coast--was once a university residence, where a group of students met briefly before going their separate ways. Twelve years later, it has been transformed into a clinic for sleep disorders, and a series of strange coincidences and ostensible synchronicities draws the same group of people together once again, each of them in different ways plagued by sleep.
        Sarah is narcoleptic, and her inability to distinguish between dreams and waking reality gives rise to a great many misunderstandings--one of which is to change Robert's life forever, as he persists for years (and then some) in his attempt to win her love. For Terry, a disillusioned film critic whose career has been derailed by Sarah's affliction, sleep is merely a memory, for his insomnia is complete and he can only yearn for the tantalizing dreams he enjoyed in youth. And for the increasingly deranged Dr. Dudden, who has made the subject the focus of his medical practice, sleep is nothing less than a global disease.
        With panache worthy of Nabokov, and with the heart to match his sophistication, Jonathan Coe has written a breathtakingly original comedy about the powers we acquire--and those we relinquish--when we fall asleep, or fall in love.

"This is a remarkable book, most impressive for its subtle narrative patterning, like a dapple of light and shade, allowing us to indulge the illusion of understanding its characters, until, all at once, the darkness, the isolation and the mystery return. Perhaps most strange of all, for a novel about insomniacs, The House of Sleep is a wonderful bedtime read."
--David Nokes, Sunday Times

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The House of Sleep is an intricate cat's cradle of a novel, full of both sly satire and oblique meditations on the interstices of love, sleep, memory, and dreams. The setting is Ashdown, a wind-swept old house by the sea that once provided university housing and now is home to a clinic for sleep disorders. During the early 1980s, a group of students meet here, united by little other than a curious preoccupation with sleep. They include Sarah, a narcoleptic who has trouble distinguishing her intensely vivid dreams from reality; her first boyfriend, the fussy egomaniac Gregory, who gets his kicks from pressing his fingers on Sarah's closed eyes; Terry, a film buff who sleeps at least 14 hours a day, dreaming blissful dreams he can never quite remember; and the sensitive Robert, who loves Sarah enough to do anything at all in order to have her. By a series of startling coincidences, the four are drawn back to Ashdown 12 years later, setting into motion a plot so carefully contrived it makes most thrillers look spare and impressionistic. Like a dream, The House of Sleep resonates with repeated images, phrases, even passages; here they serve as narrative glue for a complicated story that moves backward and forward in time and in and out of different points of view. The result is sometimes puzzling, always absorbing, and often very funny indeed.

From Publishers Weekly

A gloomy Victorian manor called Ashdown, perched on a precipice overlooking the English coastline like the anthropomorphic castle of a 19th-century gothic romance, is the setting for much of this engrossing and wildly inventive tale of demented scientists, obsessive desire, youthful idealism and anomie. As in Coe's previous book, The Winshaw Legacy, such gothic trappings serve a thoroughly contemporary story that traces the lives of several students who lived at Ashdown in the early 1980s. Then a university dormitory, it has since become a clinic for the study of sleep disorders run by the sadistic Dr. Gregory Dudden, a former student there. In chapters named in descending order after the clinical stages of sleep, the novel follows the strange coincidences of the summer of 1994 that re-acquaint Dudden with people from his past: Sarah, his narcoleptic college girlfriend, now a disillusioned schoolteacher living in London; Terry, an insomniac film critic under Dudden's supervision; and Terry's college friend Robert, whose long unrequited fixation with Sarah and confusion over his own gender led to a post-graduation vanishing act that is only explained in the very last chapter. In a series of plot twists and reversals as intricate as the electrodes that festoon the heads of the patients at Ashdown, the novel also manages to describe a university class polarized by the politics of the 1980s; the life and work of a fictitious Italian film director; an eponymous novel-within-a-novel about "midnight kidnappings" and a "notorious criminal called the Owl"; a reminiscence of the British film industry whose footnotes are hilariously askew; and an essay interpreting the events in Sarah's life from the perspective of her Lacanian psychiatrist. Balancing self-knowing references to semiotics and psychoanalysis with elegant plot symmetries, Coe proves himself as adept an architect of sparkling, highly caffeinated fictional conceits as he is a satirist of the ambiguities of identity and the afflictions of the sleep-deprived.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 331 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (February 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375400931
• ISBN-13: 978-0375400933
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,189,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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, January 22, 2000

By 

Rami Dajani - See all my reviews

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, March 8, 2001

By 

Matt Musselman (Burnaby, BC, Canada) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

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..., July 6, 2001

By 

J. Raffensperger "jen672" (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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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!