How Did You Sleep [Paperback]

Paul Glennon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2000

`Paul Glennon is a rare bird. You would never guess it from his photo on the final page of this debut collection. He stands quite ordinarily under a snowy spruce tree in what could easily be Ottawa, his home since 1975. Contextually Canadianized, he squarely faces the camera, quietly earnest and unthreatening. It's a perfectly expected portrait of a fledgling Canuck writer -- and perfectly misleading. This bird's song is complex, refreshingly impudent and previously unknown.'

Editorial Reviews

Review

`Glennon, however, is an inspired and skillful writer. His rhythm is nearly flawless, and I ended up wishing he had written these as prose poems. ``Chrome'' is one story that is beautifully realized: a man awakes to find that everything has a sheen of chrome. The narrator's fascination leads him inward and away from people, towards (ironically) the almost hyper-delicious nature of the visual and sensual. Sometimes the surface of things has its compensations.'

(Andrew Lesk Canadian Literature )

`Paul Glennon is a rare bird. You would never guess it from his photo on the final page of this debut collection. He stands quite ordinarily under a snowy spruce tree in what could easily be Ottawa, his home since 1975. Contextually Canadianized, he squarely faces the camera, quietly earnest and unthreatening. It's a perfectly expected portrait of a fledgling Canuck writer -- and perfectly misleading. This bird's song is complex, refreshingly impudent and previously unknown.

`In One Hand, a man tries to piece together the final weeks of a friend's life from the scribbled notes he has left in an edition of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The friend, having by his own admission not `an artistic bone in [his] body,' borrows da Vinci's technique of using left-hand, mirror-image writing, in hopes that the left-hand/right-brain neural connection might stimulate his creative side. As his left-hand notes produce involuntary palindromes, anagrams and increasingly mysterious poetry, his right-hand, analytical prose tries to make sense of the psychical Pandora's box he's opened. The final left-hand note offers two riddles that explain the friend's untimely death.

`The Museum of the Decay of Our Love describes a scholar's visit to a Central American history museum. The tale hovers dreamlike between dry events and the inner sparks they ignite. The museum's inert displays, steeped in the mythology of conquest and revolution, become interior metaphors for the man's own failed ambition in love. What feels initially too schematic evolves into a subtle probing of how external things morph into symbols as they enter the mind. The award-winning title story offers a bracing and revealing reconception of a very mundane sort of domestic squabbling. Other tales amuse with their satirical quirks, or wrest attention with deft observation.

`In Self-Loathing Stymies Council, we meet Mayor Nolan Plunge, a grandstanding windbag who bleats to council that self-loathing is ``a Nessus's shirt'' he wears daily. In Chrome, we're treated to a fluid metallic world evoked with keen imagination and riveting detail.

`Glennon's charms have much to do with his originality, a willingness to veer from the safer formal path. Some stories feel overly glib or disappointingly contrived, and his repeated authorial winking is sometimes too obvious. But the eccentric and penetrating psyche at work here should not be missed.'

(Jim Bartley Globe and Mail )

`In his first collection of short stories, How Did You Sleep? (Porcupine's Quill, 2000), Ottawa writer Paul Glennon eschews dirty realism and thinly-veiled autobiography for clever conceits and absurdly-extended metaphors. In one story, the president of a corporation is voted out of power by his executive board, which then votes unanimously to change him into a bear. In another, a man awakes to discover that his entire world appears to him as being made of chrome. Fiction which is funny and smart, without being either cloying or disposable, is a rare commodity in Canadian literature.'

(Nathan Whitlock Danforth Review )

Review

`How Did You Sleep is highly innovative and well-wrought. It intrigues in its layered texture, it discomforts and richly rewards its reader.'

(Dionne Brand )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0889842159
• ISBN-13: 978-0889842151
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,227,513 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars Keep an eye on this one, June 29, 2004

By 

Jamie Rosen - See all my reviews

This review is from: How Did You Sleep (Paperback)

Paul Glennon lives a real life. He works at a real job (as much as any computer-related job can be a real one.) But you wouldn't know it to read this book.

People familiar with Donald Barthelme will have some inkling of what Glennon's stories are like. But How Did You Sleep is not as distant, not as cold as Barthelme could often be. These stories are confessional; they're personal; they're also very strange: a man discovers his wife is made of wood; another man wanders through a museum devoted to his failed love affair; a high-powered businessman is thrown off the Board of Directors and turned into a bear. But the highlight story, perhaps, is not really a story at all -- it is a story merely implied in the notes for a (fictional) art exhibit.

I would heartily recommend this book to fans of Barthelme, or of Ray Vukcevich. Or to anyone interested in something coming from another direction altogether from most everyone publishing today.