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Rating: You are tidying up your old bookshelf. Stacked volumes, dust swirling gracefully up only to unpleasantly end in your lungs, resulting in a cough, a new cloud of dust, and more coughing, and so on. After nearly falling off the stool ("why on earth do I keep books so high up?"), you find in your hands a book you have particular memories of, which changed you and that you remember. To put it like Proust, however, at this point in time that book is no longer the same you read. Firstly, it is yellowed, dusty, and the cover is half detached ("and why is it sticky?"). Secondly, it is you who have changed.
More or less, this introduction reflects the lines that mark the development of the book "The House of Sleep," in which Jonathan Coe manages to depict people, places, and things in the past and present, leaving the permanent question about the future tied to a memory of the past that is sometimes pleasant, sometimes bitter and painful; in the constant intertwining of people and places at different times, personalities and situations evolve, or rather, personalities and situations change, providing the same sensation of finding a book in a library and will also evoke a certain melancholic happiness in the reader that connects to their own particular memories, and to those of the book, which succeeds in immersing those who flip through its pages into the picturesque Ashdown, "enormous and gray," that "stood about twenty meters from the live cliff face" and in the initially sociable and academic and later detached and working environments of the protagonists.
The pivotal place of the story is indeed the house of sleep, currently an institute for the treatment of sleep disorders, formerly a university residence where Gregory Dudden (who will then lead the house of sleep to the brink of a psychotic personality) lived with his then-partner Sarah, narcoleptic, charming, and sexually unstable, along with the character, together with Robert (eternally in love with her, sharing a certain sexual instability), who enlivens the story the most and intrigues the reader, almost getting lost throughout the book. Another key character in the story is Terry, an extremely interesting personality, initially a student searching for the perfect dream from which to draw a film in sleeps much longer than normal and then a chronic insomniac stressed film critic. A particularly relevant character is then the homosexual Veronica, a "freak" intellectual able to fascinate Sarah, but essentially changed over time, even arriving at a sad end to her personal story. "The House of Sleep," is among other things, a book that unites the characters in the story, and which reappears several times in different situations.
With only their university experience in common, the characters find themselves facing past memories and situations, inner crises, and a future decidedly different from what they expected, coming to cross paths again thanks to the guiding thread of sleep and progressively descending from phase one to the REM phase, as if living a dream where not everything is fine.
Beautiful and peculiar interweaving, capable of drawing the reader into the book thanks to the variety of characters it contains and the remarkable characterization each of them enjoys, and also capable of prompting reflection on many themes, if not on your own personality. The book is also very pleasant to read in any situation (even under stress) of the reader, thanks to a dry and light style, yet very immersive. Furthermore, this is not a book to be appreciated only "at a certain age" (as happened, for example, to "Jack Frusciante è uscito dal gruppo" by Brizzi), but to be reread at any moment when you want to remember.
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