Boekverslag: The House of Sleep
Content table
1. Biographical data
2. Summary
3. Processing of the book
3.1 Characters
3.2 Space
3.3 Title
4. Review
5. Bibliography
1. Biographical data
Title: The house of sleep
Author: Jonathan Coe
Publisher: Penguin books
Length: 337 pages
Written: 1997
2. Summary
Initially, a group of university students including Sarah Tudor, Gregory Dudden, Robert, and Terry reside at Ashdown. Years later some of these same students return there as either patients or staff when the building is converted into the Dudden Clinic where individuals with all sorts of sleep disorders are treated.
Sarah Tudor, the main character, is a disturbed young woman suffering from narcolepsy. She is sometimes unable to differentiate her dreams from the experiences of real life. Robert is infatuated with her and will do literally anything to please her. Gregory is Sarah's first lover, later a psychiatrist in charge of the sleep clinic, and finally a man gone mad who decides to self-experiment. Dr. Cleo Madison is a sleep psychologist whose true identity is a surprise. In this novel, reality appears more surrealistic than most dreams.
3. Processing of the book
3.1 Characters
Sarah Tudor is the main character of the book. She is troubled by unexpected sleep attacks and hallucinations she confuses with reality. This means she suffers from narcoleptic.
Gregory Dudden is Sarah's clumsy and sadistic lover, who is soon to enter medical school. Twelve years later he will run the sleep clinic where he secretly tests his theory that sleep is a disease that robs people of half their lives.
Robert is a man who pines with unrequited love for Sarah.
Terry is Robert's and Sarah's friend, a film fanatic who sleeps a minimum of 14 hours a day because he is addicted to ''dreams, he insisted, of near-paradisal loveliness'' that he can barely recall upon waking.
3.2 Space
The main setting of this story is Ashdown, a beautiful but bleak manor on the English Coast.
The odd-numbered chapters occur in the years 1983-1984, during this period all the characters are university students and they live in this English manor. Later they will appear in the novel as doctors and patients. The manor where they used to live is now a sleep clinic.
3.3 Title
The house of sleep refers of course to Ashdown as well to the period where the characters are student as to the time when Ashdown is a sleep clinic. Sleep is the subject behind the story that holds all the characters together. Sometimes sleep is absent, sometimes it is so nearby. Sarah has sleep attacks, Terry doesn?t need sleep at all and Gregory is intrigued by Sarah?s sleep disorder. Everybody in Ashdown has to deal with problems due to sleep. Twelve years later in the clinic founded by Gregory, sleep is still wondering around and the problems of the patients are tried to be solved.
4 Review
The house of sleep with is characterised as a psychological novel. But what is exactly the psychological novel and does this book fit in this genre? In order to understand it, I looked for an accurate definition of the psychological novel.
This is an epic genre, where the author puts more emphasis on the psychological situation of the main character then on the events. This genre showed up especially in the nineteenth century.
Now we can distinguish this novel as a psychological novel from other stories. Jonathan Coe emphasizes his main character Sarah Tudor and the other three characters a lot in this novel. Every single act of each character is explained through their psyche.
The novel is divided into sections to reflect the different stages of sleep -- starting with ''Awake,'' moving from ''Stage One'' through ''Stage Four'' and finishing up with ''REM Sleep'' ? it follows four loosely connected lives as they descend into an unpredictable communion with dreams.
?Tell me about your dreams,? Gregory had once said to Sarah, sitting on that same terrace, one bright November morning many years earlier. ?Tell me how long this has been going on.?[?] She tried to ignore the fact that as she spoke to Gregory, he was writing her words down in a notebook, marked ?SARAH?S PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS?. (p.38)
This fragment in the beginning of the story shows the reader that the relationship between Sarah and Gregory isn?t normal at all. At this moment a reader can get suspicious about Gregory and his intentions towards Sarah and her psychological problems. A chapter later we learn that Sarah is narcoleptic. She has dreams so vivid that she couldn't tell the difference between the things she dreamed and the things that really happened to her. This is where the main subject ?sleep? falls in the story. All characters are clearly attached to each other in one way are another, but they all seem to share one common thing; whether the absence of sleep whether the presence of it.
Terry has been hunting for years for a lost Italian film that he read about as a student. As Robert notes accusingly, Terry believes ''the only film worth seeing is one that nobody can ever see.'' In love with his dreams, Terry thinks of a lost film as ''the kind of dream that might just have been the best one you've ever had in your life, only it slips from your mind just as you're waking up, and a few seconds later you can't remember a thing about it.'' This character can?t get enough of (his) dreams; he loves it and cannot distinguish them from his real life and this makes him sort of a dream partner of Sarah, in regret of Robert; who?s from the beginning of the book in love with Sarah.
?Is it still hurting?? she asked.
?Oh?just a bit. It?ll be fine. He hoped she wasn?t going to ask him why he had been shaving
his legs in the first place. ?I didn?t mean to?well, I?m sorry if I disturbed you. (p.52)
Unfortunately he gets trapped in one of Sarah?s dreams which eventually transforms him
through the book.
?Are you going to show me what?s in there?? Dr. Dudden smiled, and toyed with the second of the golden keys on his chain. ?Have you thought about my proposal yet?? he asked. ?When you have ? and if you decide that you?d be willing to stay on here ? then I would like us to sign a little contract, giving me certain? rights over your case. (p.172-173)
The character Gregory, who is briefly Sarah?s boyfriend, becomes twelve years later Dr. Dudden, a self-important sleep specialist who has turned Ashdown into the Dudden Clinic, where he secretly tests his theory that sleep is a disease that robs people of half their lives. He proposes Terry who claims not to have slept in years to work at this human experiment in secret, because someone already died due to this experiment. Towards the end of the story, Dr. Dudden is transformed into a paranoid mad scientist so that he becomes a hilarious caricature in the story.
?I know what this is about,? he said, pointing a quivering finger at each of them in turn. ?I know what this is about, you bastards! You cooked this up together (?).You know what I?m on the brink of achieving. The fact that the name Gregory Dudden will be remembered (?) ?Gregory Dudden, did he say?? She turned to Professor Cole. ?Did he say his name was Gregory?? (p.294)
Finally we can conclude that this book is definitely a psychological novel but undoubtedly with humour. A dream or nightmare is never boring or non-active, neither is this novel and I think that?s what Coe wanted to achieve. Although towards the end I had the feeling that Coe was in a rush to elucidate all the strange situations that have been swinging through the story. This makes the end a slap in the face. With the two main subjects, sleep and love, this novel tells us that life sometimes can be a dream to all of us.
1. Biographical data
2. Summary
3. Processing of the book
3.1 Characters
3.2 Space
3.3 Title
4. Review
5. Bibliography
1. Biographical data
Title: The house of sleep
Author: Jonathan Coe
Publisher: Penguin books
Length: 337 pages
Written: 1997
2. Summary
Initially, a group of university students including Sarah Tudor, Gregory Dudden, Robert, and Terry reside at Ashdown. Years later some of these same students return there as either patients or staff when the building is converted into the Dudden Clinic where individuals with all sorts of sleep disorders are treated.
Sarah Tudor, the main character, is a disturbed young woman suffering from narcolepsy. She is sometimes unable to differentiate her dreams from the experiences of real life. Robert is infatuated with her and will do literally anything to please her. Gregory is Sarah's first lover, later a psychiatrist in charge of the sleep clinic, and finally a man gone mad who decides to self-experiment. Dr. Cleo Madison is a sleep psychologist whose true identity is a surprise. In this novel, reality appears more surrealistic than most dreams.
3. Processing of the book
3.1 Characters
Sarah Tudor is the main character of the book. She is troubled by unexpected sleep attacks and hallucinations she confuses with reality. This means she suffers from narcoleptic.
Gregory Dudden is Sarah's clumsy and sadistic lover, who is soon to enter medical school. Twelve years later he will run the sleep clinic where he secretly tests his theory that sleep is a disease that robs people of half their lives.
Robert is a man who pines with unrequited love for Sarah.
Terry is Robert's and Sarah's friend, a film fanatic who sleeps a minimum of 14 hours a day because he is addicted to ''dreams, he insisted, of near-paradisal loveliness'' that he can barely recall upon waking.
3.2 Space
The main setting of this story is Ashdown, a beautiful but bleak manor on the English Coast.
The odd-numbered chapters occur in the years 1983-1984, during this period all the characters are university students and they live in this English manor. Later they will appear in the novel as doctors and patients. The manor where they used to live is now a sleep clinic.
3.3 Title
The house of sleep refers of course to Ashdown as well to the period where the characters are student as to the time when Ashdown is a sleep clinic. Sleep is the subject behind the story that holds all the characters together. Sometimes sleep is absent, sometimes it is so nearby. Sarah has sleep attacks, Terry doesn?t need sleep at all and Gregory is intrigued by Sarah?s sleep disorder. Everybody in Ashdown has to deal with problems due to sleep. Twelve years later in the clinic founded by Gregory, sleep is still wondering around and the problems of the patients are tried to be solved.
4 Review
The house of sleep with is characterised as a psychological novel. But what is exactly the psychological novel and does this book fit in this genre? In order to understand it, I looked for an accurate definition of the psychological novel.
This is an epic genre, where the author puts more emphasis on the psychological situation of the main character then on the events. This genre showed up especially in the nineteenth century.
Now we can distinguish this novel as a psychological novel from other stories. Jonathan Coe emphasizes his main character Sarah Tudor and the other three characters a lot in this novel. Every single act of each character is explained through their psyche.
The novel is divided into sections to reflect the different stages of sleep -- starting with ''Awake,'' moving from ''Stage One'' through ''Stage Four'' and finishing up with ''REM Sleep'' ? it follows four loosely connected lives as they descend into an unpredictable communion with dreams.
?Tell me about your dreams,? Gregory had once said to Sarah, sitting on that same terrace, one bright November morning many years earlier. ?Tell me how long this has been going on.?[?] She tried to ignore the fact that as she spoke to Gregory, he was writing her words down in a notebook, marked ?SARAH?S PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS?. (p.38)
This fragment in the beginning of the story shows the reader that the relationship between Sarah and Gregory isn?t normal at all. At this moment a reader can get suspicious about Gregory and his intentions towards Sarah and her psychological problems. A chapter later we learn that Sarah is narcoleptic. She has dreams so vivid that she couldn't tell the difference between the things she dreamed and the things that really happened to her. This is where the main subject ?sleep? falls in the story. All characters are clearly attached to each other in one way are another, but they all seem to share one common thing; whether the absence of sleep whether the presence of it.
Terry has been hunting for years for a lost Italian film that he read about as a student. As Robert notes accusingly, Terry believes ''the only film worth seeing is one that nobody can ever see.'' In love with his dreams, Terry thinks of a lost film as ''the kind of dream that might just have been the best one you've ever had in your life, only it slips from your mind just as you're waking up, and a few seconds later you can't remember a thing about it.'' This character can?t get enough of (his) dreams; he loves it and cannot distinguish them from his real life and this makes him sort of a dream partner of Sarah, in regret of Robert; who?s from the beginning of the book in love with Sarah.
?Is it still hurting?? she asked.
?Oh?just a bit. It?ll be fine. He hoped she wasn?t going to ask him why he had been shaving
his legs in the first place. ?I didn?t mean to?well, I?m sorry if I disturbed you. (p.52)
Unfortunately he gets trapped in one of Sarah?s dreams which eventually transforms him
through the book.
?Are you going to show me what?s in there?? Dr. Dudden smiled, and toyed with the second of the golden keys on his chain. ?Have you thought about my proposal yet?? he asked. ?When you have ? and if you decide that you?d be willing to stay on here ? then I would like us to sign a little contract, giving me certain? rights over your case. (p.172-173)
The character Gregory, who is briefly Sarah?s boyfriend, becomes twelve years later Dr. Dudden, a self-important sleep specialist who has turned Ashdown into the Dudden Clinic, where he secretly tests his theory that sleep is a disease that robs people of half their lives. He proposes Terry who claims not to have slept in years to work at this human experiment in secret, because someone already died due to this experiment. Towards the end of the story, Dr. Dudden is transformed into a paranoid mad scientist so that he becomes a hilarious caricature in the story.
?I know what this is about,? he said, pointing a quivering finger at each of them in turn. ?I know what this is about, you bastards! You cooked this up together (?).You know what I?m on the brink of achieving. The fact that the name Gregory Dudden will be remembered (?) ?Gregory Dudden, did he say?? She turned to Professor Cole. ?Did he say his name was Gregory?? (p.294)
Finally we can conclude that this book is definitely a psychological novel but undoubtedly with humour. A dream or nightmare is never boring or non-active, neither is this novel and I think that?s what Coe wanted to achieve. Although towards the end I had the feeling that Coe was in a rush to elucidate all the strange situations that have been swinging through the story. This makes the end a slap in the face. With the two main subjects, sleep and love, this novel tells us that life sometimes can be a dream to all of us.
Andere boekverslagen van boeken geschreven door Jonathan Coe
1
boekverslag
The House of Sleep
