Sleep: A Utopian Bestiary

""Suddenly, alongside and inseparable from his perception of rest, as similar to rest as a synonym, he felt time slipping by, and the dead hour and so much, so very much silence already wasted."" An almost torturously detailed anatomy of insomnia, Sleep, by Sicilian novelist Michele Spina (1923-1990), author of West of the Moon, traces the elliptical ramblings and drunken prowlings of a narrator desperate for some soporific thought or vision to put him out of his misery. The heady meditations are set against a surreal nocturnal world of whores, cafe bars, dwarves and bureaucrats the man encounters in his wanderings. Innovative but amorphous, the book, which Spina completed just before his death, may find fans among the Dalkey Archive set.