The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Sleep: A Utopian Bestiary by Michele SpinaPedro Ponce
Michele Spina. Sleep: A Utopian Bestiary. Trans. Ann Colcord with Hugh Shankland. Colin Smythe/Dufour Editions, 2002. 127 pp. Paper: $19.95.
Insomnia is elevated to high art in Sleep: A Utopian Bestiary, Michele Spina’s meditation on life, death, dreams, memory, and the tenuous borders that separate them. The episodic story centers on a nameless protagonist, thirty-five years old and otherwise healthy, who is unable to get a good night’s sleep. In the course of his frustrated pursuit of rest, he encounters a series of strange, nocturnal characters, including “the demon,” a former circus dwarf, and two grotesques known only as “the toad” and “the worm.” In the protagonist’s sleep-deprived state of mind, the line between inner life and external reality is perpetually blurred. The resulting narrative has a surrealist texture reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros. At the same time, Spina’s story is informed by an urgency that is both political and existential. At a brothel visited at one point by the main character, a prostitute makes comments that suggest the author’s own ambivalent attitudes about his native Italy: “Our nation is bizarre: our countrymen combine the bestiality of a savage people with the duplicity and depravity of a civilised one.” Elsewhere, Spina’s protagonist confronts a solitude in which “he was so alone he wasn’t even with himself.” The journey that Spina creates for his readers is often disorienting, and whatever peace the protagonist does attain is approximate at best. But at its most compelling, Sleep imbues one man’s quest for sleep—and, ultimately, for whatever meaning is possible in his life—with the revelatory beauty of a dream. [Pedro Ponce]