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So Many Ways To Sleep Badly (2008)

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore(Favorite Author)

3.73 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0872864685 (ISBN13: 9780872864689)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

City Lights Publishers

review 1: A kind of stream-of-consciousness affair that I just couldn't warm to I suppose I'm a bit of a traditionalist but I do like a novel to have some sort of beginning middle and end. This was confusing the narrator slips from recounting his day to recounting his dreams and you can't always work out which is which or if anything is even true - like his childhood memories which his family deny. It was certainly a window onto a different world (not one I want to stay in though!) and some of the wordplay was amusing.
review 2: To read So Many Ways to Sleep Badly is to be plunged, five senses searing, into the frenetic, poetic prose universe of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's unique design. No doubt, to share this world is both a privilege and a punishment, faced as we ... moreare with the blow-by-blow accounts of the highs and lows of the human body and psyche. The crippling emotional pain of a past tainted by incest is never far from the tremulous outer edges of Sycamore's mind as she spars daily with fibromyalgia and turns tricks for rent money. "Heavy" does not begin to cover it. And yet the book is sprinkled with welcome moments of levity that balloon unexpectedly, and shrink just as quickly.Like the most restless of sleepless nights, this book is rife with visions and manic streams of consciousness, the narrative a pulsing throb of a heartbeat on the ever-thinner line between awake and asleep, dream and nightmare. The roaches and pigeons and rats are poised to torture or comfort as the situation demands, a resilient army of constant companions. Egocentric in the extreme, the lens of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly keeps a tight focus on Sycamore, though the book would not exist without the backdrop of the San Francisco, and the cast of players that call her home: tweakers, hookers, queens, fags, dykes, johns, all alive and unwell.This book is as mentally trying to read as it seems to have challenged Sycamore in the writing of it. Chapter breaks and dialogue provide short pit stops on the all-night train of thoughts and ideas that characterize this manic narrative style. Exhausted and wired at once, you have no option but to trail in the shadow of our gender-bending hooker hero(ine). This book is not for the inattentive; too much slips through the cracks. Nor is it for the weak-hearted, unable or unwilling to bear the persistent pain of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly. And yet space remains for chances and scraps of relief: love in a craigslist hook-up; sea lions on the pier; a restful night (or day) of sleep; one more hallway, or stretch of sidewalk, just begging to be a runway. Hold out for those moments, if you can.Review by Kelly Moritz less

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