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    Sleeping Patterns
    Sleeping Patterns
    Sleeping Patterns
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Sleeping Patterns

    By J.R. Crook

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    In a run-down student residence in South London, Annelie Strandli, a beautiful but confused designer, who is disorientated after leaving her native Finland, finds herself gravitating towards Berry Walker, an insomniac and aspiring writer.

    Berry is often introspective and withdrawn, but in his writings Annelie sees the chance to glimpse him as he truly is. With the help of the narrator, she conspires to discover parts of a secret story that is concealed within his desk. As Annelie gradually puts the pieces together, she finds herself questioning not only her relationship to Berry, but ultimately the dividing line between fiction and memory.

    Sleeping Patterns is a novel of intricate layers, hidden within each a tale of love, uncertain meanings, and the relationship between writer and reader.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLegend Press
    Release dateMay 27, 2012
    ISBN9781908775603
    Sleeping Patterns

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    Reviews for Sleeping Patterns

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Have we found another Ondaatje? J.R. Crook's debut novel might just remind you of his style, but is ultimately unique. The brevity of the book does nothing if not emphasize the power of the prose and impact of its meaning. A must read!
    • 4/5
      The latest winner of the Luke Bitmead Award, the prize I won myself back in 2008, Sleeping Patterns is an intelligent, intriguing and ultimately rewarding book.It’s experimental in nature. The author, J.R. Crook, stated in an interview with his publisher that “the most obvious influence on Sleeping Patterns was probably Roland Barthes’s (in)famous essay ‘The Death of the Author,’ together with the related thoughts of Foucault.” He also listed Sartre, Calvino, Joyce, Musil and Pessoa as influences.So you won’t be surprised when I tell you that Sleeping Patterns is a far from straightforward narrative. The games begin, in fact, in the dedication, “to the memory of the author”. The introduction is written by one of the characters in the book, Annelie Strandli, and she explains that J.R. Crook is dead and she’s put the book together out of 15 stories sent to her by post.In fact, J.R. Crook is alive and well – I saw him receive the prize and the large cheque for the Luke Bitmead Bursary last year, and chatted with him briefly afterwards. So the dedication is part of the fiction, and presumably a nod to the Barthes essay mentioned earlier. (If you’re interested, by the way, the essay is available online here. The point appears to be that the author is divorced from the text at the moment of its creation, and it becomes the property of readers. It is readers who create meaning in the text, and critics’ traditional role of seeking authorial intention is pointless.)The 15 stories were sent to Annelie out of order, and she’s preserved that order in the book, while numbering the chapters to show their “true” order. So we begin with chapter 5, then go to chapter 1, then chapter 11, and so on. The story, such as it is, tells of the strange relationship between Annelie and Berry Walker, a writer who lives in the same student residence in south London, as does Jamie Crook. Annelie tries to understand the enigmatic Berry by sneaking into his room and reading stories that he leaves in his desk drawer.The twist at the end is very clever and ties things together beautifully. I won’t divulge it here for those who are interested in reading the book, but it’s one of those good twists that throws a new light on what was really happening in the book while being completely credible. It’s unexpected, but when you read it you feel as if you should have expected it. It’s also, as you’d expect, tied up with the questions of authorship and interpretation of texts that so fascinate J.R. Crook (the real one, not the character in the book).Sleeping Patterns is a ‘minimalist’ book. Well, OK, it’s short. Just 108 pages, and that’s with some pretty generous white space. But the length feels about right for this book. The story of Berry and Annelie is not in itself particularly compelling, and the writing style creates a distance between the reader and the characters. At no point did I experience the illusion that I had really entered the world of the characters. It wasn’t that the characters were not believable or well-drawn; it was more that the disjointed narrative and the appearances of the author kept reminding me that I was reading a work of fiction. Because of this distance, I think the work might have failed to sustain my interest for 400 pages. As clever and well-constructed as the literary puzzle was, it was still a literary puzzle, and such things are best kept brief. 108 pages felt about right.Overall, I’d definitely recommend this as a good, thought-provoking read. Although it’s quite a complex book, and despite the somewhat heavy list of influences, it’s not a difficult read. It’s the kind of book where the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out. But you don’t need a PhD in cultural studies to enjoy it. It’s a book that speaks to the intellect rather than the emotions, and as such it will appeal to some but not others.

    Book preview

    Sleeping Patterns - J.R. Crook

    Crook

    5

    November.

    Tomorrow, for feeling unable to resist doing so, Annelie Strandli would ascend the stairwell with cautious footsteps. The hallway she would reach on the seventh floor would be dimly lit and grey. She would walk along it and from underneath each of the closed doors she passed by, feel rushes of cold air on her bare ankles that would make her shiver.

    It would be for her curiosity, for her need to discover more about him, that she would approach his room at the end of the hallway and open it without knocking. She would be seeking evidence of his writings, of any imagined words that he may have committed to a page. She would be hoping that small fictions and understated truths were there for her to find. She would be fancying the image of the writer’s hands, like those of an illusionist’s, revealing to her all manner of things invisible before.

    Everything would be as she expected it to be: the door would be unlocked and she would only need to push it; the room would be empty and she would only need to cross it; he would be elsewhere and she would only need to remember it. She would have an idea about where his writings might be found, should any actually exist. She would approach his wooden desk at the far side of the room and push aside the piles of things he would always leave on top.

    She would not feel the reservations she had thought she would. Her conscience would stay strangely quiet. She would be considering it essential that she understood more about the person whom, in just over six weeks, she had grown so quickly fond of. She would be hoping that in the quiet gaps between his words and in the spaces behind his pages, his truth would be there for her to find. She would envisage signposts being noted and puzzle-pieces being found and the comfort she would feel afterwards, for knowing him a little deeper.

    There would be the sound of rain hitting the windows. Briefly, she would pause to glance outside and follow the rainwater as it tumbled down the sides of the opposing building. Then, to deny herself enough time to change her mind, she would quickly flip open the lid of the desk and reveal an inner compartment. She would smile, having been proven right. Inside, lying awkwardly upon a bed of cigarette ash, there would be papers, pages of typed writing. Then, without any hesitation, she would sit down and allow herself to drift carelessly into the beginning of the story…

    One

    Once upon a time, upon a day that might have easily been forgotten, there was a boy who was dreaming about nothing in particular. He was slumping idly in his seat, having allowed his mind to depart into a dangerous sleep. In the background of his dream, he began to hear a familiar voice, shortly followed by the sensation of being shaken by the shoulder.

    ‘Hey! It’s time to go home. Or would you prefer to be left here alone?’

    Arriving back from what felt like a great distance away, the dreamer began to show signs of life.

    ‘Come on, it really is time for us to go now… ’

    He heard the sounds of the wind in the trees, the creaking of an old window frame, the banging of a door that had been caught by a draught. He opened his eyes and looked around. The room was empty; it had been deserted immediately after the bell had rung.

    ‘Let’s go… ’

    Finally, Boy One rose from his chair, rubbed his eyes and then followed his friend out into the hallway.

    ‘Is the lesson really over already?’ he asked.

    ‘Yes and before you ask - he didn’t notice you,’ Boy Two answered, pre-empting his friend’s next question, ‘or at least, I don’t think he did. But maybe Mr Letters has become so used to your habits that he no longer cares to do anything about it… ’

    Together they walked down the steps at the front of the school and onto the pavement. Boy One watched as his friend paced ahead and listened to the sound made by a lone pencil as it bounced around his empty rucksack.

    ‘Hey! Wait for me!’ he called out, seeing that Boy Two had reached the entrance to the park without him.

    ‘Come on,’ Boy Two shouted back, ‘why are you so slow?’

    ‘Sorry,’ replied Boy One, as he quickly jogged the distance between them. ‘I’m still feeling quite sleepy. I did only just wake up, after all.’

    ‘It’s fine. Only, can we get going now… we’re going to Old Man’s today, aren’t we?’

    ‘Of course we are. Isn’t that what lunch money’s for?’

    Boy Two grinned, but then turned to his friend and sensing that something was not quite right, commented: ‘You’re different today, somehow. What’s wrong with you?’

    There was not so much as anything wrong with Boy One, rather his priorities were opposite to what is generally considered right. He was a dreamer. To him, it seemed as if the people he was surrounded by – his parents, his peers, the residents of the small town where he lived – all held the act of dreaming in little regard. They had all consigned dreaming to the small hours, to times of nocturnal abandon. They only dreamt in secluded places, in blanketed corners. They paid little, if any attention toward the theatre of the naked mind and preferred, upon daybreak, to forget their times spent wandering in the clouds.

    For Boy One however, the arena of sleep was wide, and the dreams it contained were without walls or recipe. He believed there to be no quilted nest, or daytime routine that could ever stop him from dreaming whenever he pleased. The difference between Boy One and his peers was that he always contested his alarm clock and allowed his dreaming to overflow into the daylight hours.

    ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘I was just thinking about something, that’s all.’

    ‘Well, I think you need to stop sleeping in class... ’

    ‘Hmm… ’

    Boy One stopped to tighten a loose shoelace that had been blackened by the underside of his shoe, then looked up and added: ‘By the way, I wasn’t just sleeping - I was dreaming.’

    ‘Okay, okay,’ Boy Two rolled his eyes, growing impatient, ‘and do you want to know what you missed whilst you were, er, away?’

    ‘Of course.’

    As they moved on, the shop came into view; it was at the far side of the park and felt magnetic.

    ‘It was about power and economics and the rules of success... ’

    ‘So?’

    ‘… and something called Globalisation… ’

    They finally reached the shop and pushed against the door. As they entered, the bronze bell that was hanging above them rang.

    ‘That’s a big word.’

    ‘Yep. Glo-bal-is-a-tion,’ repeated Boy Two as he pulled his money out from his pocket. ‘I think it’s some kind of movement - it’s the new Enlightenment, apparently.’

    The two boys each opened a small paper bag and began to fill them with sweets from the containers on the shelves.

    ‘So when I woke up, why were all of those names written on the blackboard?’

    ‘Oh yes, they were the names of powerful men. Their job is to keep the balance of power in the world weighed in their own – and therefore our – favour. I didn’t recognise any of them from TV, but apparently they’re very important men.’

    ‘Is that what Mr

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