the house of sleep

spend some enchanting hours with "The House of Sleep", one of Jonathan Coe's acclaimed books......I basically had to...it had so much to interest me...sleep (a latest passion)...and confusions. and it was so emotionally recommended by V.
but... but, it was overwhelming circular- even if twisted and broken in past and present, dream and reality...all comes together at the end, where "soul-mates never die".
actually my slight disillusion should be blamed on V making me search for a perfect resemblance of a girl he is in love with and the character of Sarah; neither could I identify him with the boy helplessly attached to her, Robert.

what i appreciate about it is the wonderful non-pretentious style and playful dialog, as well as downplaying that emotional key. I also found somebody I'd like to be like- at least for a while-a character who during his college years sleeps 14 h a day and uses the rest to watch films. later, he becomes a film critic and an insomniac who can make it through a 134 films cine-marathon. unfortunately being that cool only lands him in a profound coma, maybe the privilege of replaying all the images stashed in his memory.

a poem at the end of the book brings loose threads in a ball of hope.

Somniloquy

Your gravity, your grace have turned a tide
In me, no lunar power can reverse;
But in your narcoleptic eyes I spied
A slightlessness tonight: or something worse,
A disregard that made me feel unmanned.
Meanwhile, insomniac, I catch my breath
To think I saw my future traced in sand
One afternoon 'as still, as carved, as death',
And pray for an oblivion so deep
It ends in transformation. Only dawn
Can save me, flood this haunted house of sleep
With light, and drown the ghosts that nightly warn:
Another lifetime is the least you'll need, to trace
The guarded secrets of her gravity, her grace.

a professional review that doesn't doze you off you can find here

Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle

i think george orwell was a gentleman who basically*got it* in a higher degree than others and had a special type of intuition into the order of things. before delivering to the world *the animal farm * and his key-novel *1984*, he writes a book with a biographical touch to it, *coming up for air*.
the story is impressive in the manner in which a casual life of a casual character is made worthwhile(to the reader) by the analysis of a changing world and the conclusions drawn. there is nothing tragic in orwell about the fact that the past is like a childhood pleasure forever lost, but there is rather the lucid recognition of the fact that we learn nothing from it, thus mistakes are likely to be repeated. this is not unsual to put inside a character who took part to the First World War and who senses the arrival of the Second, but what is amazing is this book being written in 1938!

*War! I started thinking about it again. It's coming soon, that's certain. But who's afraid of war? That is to say, who's afraid of the bombs and the machine-guns? 'You are', you say. Yes, I am, and so's anybody who's ever seen them. But it isn't the war that matters, it's the after-war. The world we're going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the procession of the posters with enormous faces. and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke. It's all going to happen. Or isn't it? Some days I know it's impossible, other days I know it's inevitable.*( Coming Up for Air, pp. 157)