- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; Open market ed edition (26 Mar 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140274421
- ISBN-13: 978-0140274424
- Product Dimensions: 17.5 x 10.7 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,141,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The House of Sleep
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Product Description
Review
Moving, clever, pleasurable, smart ... one of the best books of the year (Malcolm Bradbury The Times )
There are bits that make you laugh out loud and others which make your heart ache (Guardian )
Fiercely clever, witty, wise, hopeful ... a compellingly beautiful tale of love and loss (Times Literary Supplement )
Remarkable ... a wonderful bedtime read (Sunday Times ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
There are bits that make you laugh out loud and others which make your heart ache (Guardian )
Fiercely clever, witty, wise, hopeful ... a compellingly beautiful tale of love and loss (Times Literary Supplement )
Remarkable ... a wonderful bedtime read (Sunday Times ) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Product Description
Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events; Robert has had his life changed for ever by the misunderstandings arising from her condition; Terry, the insomniac, spends his wakeful nights fuelling his obsession with movies; and the increasingly unstable Dr Gregory Dudden sees sleep as a life-shortening disease which must be eradicated .
A group of students sharing a house. They fall in and out of love, they drift apart. Yet a decade later they are drawn back together by a series of coincidences involving their obsession with sleep - and each other ...
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"Huge, grey and imposing": the three adjectives appear two-thirds of the way down the opening page of Jonathan Coe's fifth novel, introducing the story's main setting, a house shared by a group of university students, in some indeterminate location on the English coast. Twenty-three pages later, those same words reappear, introducing an identical description of the same house, now the house of sleep of the title, a private clinic treating patients suffering from various sleep-disorders. The narrative has now moved forward some twelve years, the original student inhabitants have moved on - although most of them, in various guises, will be back... From there on the novel, in alternating chapters, moves backwards and forwards between undergraduate days in the eighties and "post-undergraduate" days - in many respects post-innocence days - in the mid-nineties.
There is equally something huge and imposing about the novel itself, which I have just reread in the space of an afternoon. Its atmosphere is from the start uncomfortably sinister; whereas other reviewers have tended to insist on the comic elements of the story, it should also be pointed out that the characters are, each in his or her own private way, both unhappy and unstable. And the novel's undoubted strength lies in the way it draws the reader inside these different versions of unhappiness and instability, forcing him or her to question the very nature of identity, and also to ask to what extent we can - or should - attempt to change it.
The novel is also grey - though not in any conventionally negative way. Dealing not only with the nature of dreams, the narrative also examines those awkward, Proustian grey areas between the conscious and unconscious minds. In the case of one character, Sarah, whose dreams are so vivid that she can no longer reliably distinguish between the things she has said and done and those she has only dreamt about, the nature of reality itself is tantalisingly questioned.
And yet Jonathan Coe's novel is not one of those postmodernist works like Auster's "New York Trilogy" in which the narratological pyrotechnics are such that the actual story-line - assuming there is one - becomes an irrelevant detail. Coe's non-linear complexity is complexity in the best tradition of "Wuthering Heights". And I defy any sensitive reader not to sprout a few goose-pimples when he reaches the overwhelmingly moving conclusion to what is, again like "Wuthering Heights", one of the most hauntingly unconventional of love-stories.
There is equally something huge and imposing about the novel itself, which I have just reread in the space of an afternoon. Its atmosphere is from the start uncomfortably sinister; whereas other reviewers have tended to insist on the comic elements of the story, it should also be pointed out that the characters are, each in his or her own private way, both unhappy and unstable. And the novel's undoubted strength lies in the way it draws the reader inside these different versions of unhappiness and instability, forcing him or her to question the very nature of identity, and also to ask to what extent we can - or should - attempt to change it.
The novel is also grey - though not in any conventionally negative way. Dealing not only with the nature of dreams, the narrative also examines those awkward, Proustian grey areas between the conscious and unconscious minds. In the case of one character, Sarah, whose dreams are so vivid that she can no longer reliably distinguish between the things she has said and done and those she has only dreamt about, the nature of reality itself is tantalisingly questioned.
And yet Jonathan Coe's novel is not one of those postmodernist works like Auster's "New York Trilogy" in which the narratological pyrotechnics are such that the actual story-line - assuming there is one - becomes an irrelevant detail. Coe's non-linear complexity is complexity in the best tradition of "Wuthering Heights". And I defy any sensitive reader not to sprout a few goose-pimples when he reaches the overwhelmingly moving conclusion to what is, again like "Wuthering Heights", one of the most hauntingly unconventional of love-stories.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is simply such an impressive book.
Coe writes about the one thing from which nobody can escape, and which nobody really talks about, and manages to put it at the centre of every character's life. All of his astonishingly vivid and separate characters - from the imaginative and solitary Terry to the disturbingly cold Dr Dudden - share sleep as something which changes their lives, and which eventually pushes them all back together, whether they like it or not.
The book contains everything you need to keep you hooked through every waking and sleeping moment - familiar characters (you'll see yourself in at least one of them!), an interesting plot and subject, a beatifully lucid writing style and the most intricately woven relationships since Wuthering Heights.
Each chapter inches the characters alternately further apart, and further together, as the book races effortlessly to the final lines.
Coe is marvellous, and his book is a dream to read.
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This really is a perfect novel; Coe's magnum opus - a proper landmark in fiction that deserves to be read, debated, studied and held in wonder. And no - I am not an associate of the author, just a huge fan of this book. I have just finished reading it for the third time. If you are thinking about buying this book you should believe all of the reviews that mention its "unputdownability".
To reveal the details of the plot would be a crime against those who have not read this book, but suffice to say that the style is breathtakingly easy, even as it accelerates towards its disturbing and emotionally tense climax.
Coe is to be praised for his attention to detail and the web of symbolism that he creates. Even the smallest detail is revealed to have deep significances that reverberate throughout the text in a complex (but not complicated) network of cause-and-effect. The book deconstructs narratives, challenges the assumed relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, so psychologists beware. As for everyone else, you will simply never think of sleep in the same way. As E.A. Poe said:
"Sleep... those little slices of death. How I loathe them."...
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
His Best Book
A wonderful story of student life, enduring love, transsexuality and sleep disorders. Coe's novel begins with a group of students at a seaside campus university (possibly Exeter;... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Kate Hopkins
Disappointed
According to the other reviews on this book, I was in for a very good read and .... I ended up disappointed. Read more
Published 22 months ago by BookAddict
Tosh
What a disappointment. I was expecting something similar to One Day by David Nicholls and it was a complete letdown. Boring characters and stupid storyline.
Published 23 months ago by gez
To sleep, perchance to dream
I've only just discovered Jonathan Coe, and wonder where I've been to miss this book.
Although there are a few slightly outrageous coincidences in the book, the... Read more
Although there are a few slightly outrageous coincidences in the book, the... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Lady Fancifull
Wow.
I finished this book late last night, and then was haunted by it all night long - could not tell, on waking this morning, how much I had lain awake thinking about it, and how much... Read more
Published on 5 May 2009 by B. Zee
Pulp liberal
My main problem with this book was that it panders to my own left wing Yogurt weaving prejudices about 'the man' in very obvious way. Read more
Published on 23 Jun 2008 by Gizmo Burns
Some really dark moments
Brilliantly constructed follow-up to What a Carve Up! A group of students share a house in the early 1980s and despite their intense impact on one another they appear to go their... Read more
Published on 23 Oct 2007 by Wynne Kelly
House Of Sleep
This book improves the further you read - I found the initial chapters a little hard going. However, I was gripped by the end and enjoyed the twists in the latter part.
Published on 3 Oct 2007 by gerty guinea
Memorable book
I say this book is memorable but I seem to have forgotten large chunks of it - well, I have slept a lot since I read it. Read more
Published on 28 May 2007 by lilysmum
bravo
i was entertained educated amused..... contains everythng a good novel should.. it made me wistful for my student days... Read more
Published on 9 Feb 2007 by J. Pickles
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