The Eyelid

by S.D. Chrostowska

An unnamed, unemployed, dream-prone narrator finds himself following Chevauchet, diplomat of Onirica, a foreign republic of dreams, to resist a prohibition on sleep in near-future America. On a mission to combat the state-sponsored drugging of citizens with uppers for greater productivity, they traverse an eerie landscape in an everlasting autumn, able to see inside other people's nightmares and dreams. As Comprehensive Illusions - a social media-like entity that hijacks creativity - overtakes the masses, Chevauchet, the old radical, weakens and disappears, leaving our narrator to take up Chevauchet's dictum that "daydreaming is directly subversive" and forge ahead on his own.

In slippery, exhilarating and erudite prose, The Eyelid revels in the camaraderie of free thinking that can only happen on the lam, aiming to rescue a species that can no longer dream.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Canada, Dystopia, Science Fiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2020

About the author

S.D. Chrostowska is an instructor of Social and Political Thought at York University in Canada. Her essays, short fiction, and articles have appeared in The Believer, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Hedgehog Review, New German Critique, Public Culture, New Literary History, SubStance, boundary 2, among others.

Chrostowska was raised in Warsaw and divides her time between Toronto and Paris.

Reviews

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel that takes in dreams, reveries, and daydreams, in a world where such free thinking poses a risk to the State. As always with Chrostowska, the writing is incisive, and the language is often gorgeous:

"Come autumn, the eyes reap colour against the lengthening shadows and the night that seals them closed, as if nature, having already given spring to love and summer to leisure, made a season especially for dreamers, its days hazy and heavy-lidded, its evenings haloed and smudged by rain, the hours’ hypnotic passage sleeping all who, dazed and doubled in themselves, fall leaflike under its spell."

That's the opening paragraph.

Highly recommended. Joins Surrealism with current political thought, and much, of course, about the importance of sleep and the dreamworld.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 3 out of 5]

While slow-paced, this book offers much food for thought. In its dream-centric pseudo dystopian world, a hazy view of political and philosophical implications can be gleaned around the jewel-like edges. Yet, I hoped for more startling imagery. There are a few striking moments, but not enough intense focus on the atmosphere to capture my attention for long stretches of time. The author employs a learned style but the narrative distance is stilted, and the short chapters do not build much tension, following one another like micro-dreams. While poetic and creative, I was never immersed. While intelligent and quirky, I will fail to remember most of the details. But some dreams are still worth having, even if they are forgotten...

[Chris Via]

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# Video review: https://youtu.be/p7S1JaoBzQM #
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Transcript review:

And the aim was not revolution as we know it. Our resistance to the system could only take shape where one overthrew the symbolic order of reality: in a united dreamworld (48).

This book was sent to me from the Toronto-based publisher Coach House Books. The first thing that seized my attention was the construction of the physical book. As soon as my fingers came into contact with these pages I registered that something was a bit different. Visually, there was a nice creaminess that I’ve seen plenty of times before, but tactilely there was a pleasing ribbed texture. In the back of the book it explains that it was printed on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jerome, Quebec, from second-growth forests. And it was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. This was a smart choice because it really sets the book apart and indulges my love for the physical text.

I’m a sucker for the Luddite novel. Give me anything that rails against the ruination of humanity in exchange for technological advancement we don’t need and I’m as happy--and agitated--as my teenaged self, reading Walden for the first time. I’m also a sucker for books written by professors. Barth, Gass, Eco, the list goes on. And The Eyelid is both of these. It takes the form of “a utopia wrapped in a dystopia,” as the publisher calls it in their trailer for the book (link in the description below).

S. D. Chrostowska is a professor in the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. In addition to numerous academic publications, she previously published an inventive epistolary novel with Dalkey Archive in 2013. I would list all of her accolades, but I want to get to the book. Suffice it to say that Chrostowska is smarter than both of us.

Paris is now the capital of Greater America, a universal state of the near future. The totalitarian regime has figured out how to prohibit sleep and reverie to further the productivity of its citizens. Like Soma in Huxley’s Brave New World, which blankets over any form of discontent and unhappiness to make the state’s citizens pliable, here we have the drug Potium, which sustains the health of its users while eliminating their need for sleep, which the government has deemed the new “opium of the masses.” As another means of keeping the dream-prohibited masses servile, there is a Westworld-esque virtual reality called Comprehensive Illusion that allows people to indirectly fulfill their need to dream in a state-regulated environment.

A revolutionary named Chevauchet approaches our unnamed narrator, a dreamer in the Romantic and literal sense of the word, and leads him on a Virgilian tour through Onirica, a world built on dreams, which Chevauchet hopes to establish as the opposition to the totalitarian state.
Many different names crossed my mind as I read this book: Casares, Borges, Philip K. Dick, Voltaire, Camus, Orwell, Huxley. Even Lovecraft flitted through my head as I read a particular passage of the narrator’s thoughts concerning Chevauchet; it had the feel of the narrator in Lovecraft’s “From Beyond” as he writes about Crawford Tillinghast. But these writers only shade the work. Chrostowska forges her own style.

It’s a small book and highly concentrated in its thesis. The unnamed narrator becomes our guide, just as Chevauchet is his guide. The unemployed, narcoleptic narrator works on multiple levels. First, he is precisely the type of person the universal state of Greater American despises--that is, a dreamer. Second, he is precisely the type of person Chevauchet needs to develop his uptopia. And on still another level, the narrator is poetically inclined, which counterbalances Chevauchet’s often dry and didactic discourse. The result confirms that Chrostowska is adept as both professor and poet.
We get lines of sharp imagery delivered in luscious prose:

Come autumn, the eyes reap color against the lengthening shadows and the night that seals them closed, as if nature, having already given spring to love and summer to leisure, made a season especially for dreamers, its days hazy and heavy-lidded, its evenings haloed and smudged by rain, the hours’ hours hypnotic passage sleeping all who, dazed and doubled in themselves, fall leaflike under its spell (9).

…where the air was clearer, crisper, where the grass was grizzled by frost… (10-11).

As white silence fell around me in flakes… (13).

I shivered as I uttered these words, feeling upon me the breath of approaching night, in whose cavernous mouth I caught sight of the uvular pendant of a waterfall (21).

The closing sentences, too, are delivered in a manner that brings an ache to the chest for its poignant beauty.

The majority of the novel is dedicated to the exposition of Chevauchet’s oneiric ideas, his manifesto, his plans for Onirica’s revolution. It is thus a novel of ethos more than pathos, stimulating thought more than emotion. As the narrator says of him: “Many of Chevauchet’s ‘teachings’ were hard to take in large drafts. Nor did he bother to sweeten them. But, in his tireless animation, he would sometimes shift from the often dry, critical register to something like poetry” (63). Thus this book, too, is serialized into small sips of chapters, emulating the narrator’s processing and synthesis of all the information.

The best way to approach the book is as an innovation of the Platonic dialogue with Chevauchet as Socrates and the narrator as one of the many Platonic devil’s advocates. The narrator acts as a fulcrum to balance Chevauchet’s extended treatise on dreaming as the last bastion of personal freedom and the way in which his utopia can redeem this besieged front. These fragments of his philosophy are richly drawn from the author’s obvious critical thinking on the subject. Fantacide (death of the imagination); egeirocracy (a regime of total wakefulness); and Narcopolis (a community of sleepers). Chrostowska’s stringing of academic jargon gives a legitimacy to the book that blurs the certainty of whether or not this is fiction. I had to slow down and, well, think. This is a novel of ideas, not a simple theoretical thriller that flares in your mind as an ephemeral conjecture and then fizzles out. No. The Eyelid’s ideas are potent and beg real consideration.

The argument presented in the book is a crucial one. As we become more and more reliant on technology, we can begin to impose the same expectations of immediacy, precision, and endurance on human beings. In the book, the points about insomnia and workaholism as national values are particularly relevant. The worker who works his- or herself to the bone is valued in the workplace above the worker who simply fulfills the expectations of the job. Going above and beyond is the new average. And as for thinkers and artists, I recall David Denby’s telling statement from Great Books: “In America, a grown man or woman reading at home during the day is not a person to be taken seriously” (195). Points on this debate have also been expounded in Bertrand Russell’s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness” where he argues for the 4-hour workday and traces out the origins and development of labor as a virtue and leisure as waste. The apparently unpopular argument goes that a worker could produce higher quality work in a shorter amount of time if they are given ample time for leisure and rest, as opposed to the coffee-addled, bleary-eyed workforce that yawns its way through an eight-hour-plus day, eking out mediocre work. But try it out with your manager and see how far you get.

One of the most chilling moments in the book occurs when the narrator finds himself drifting off and people grab his shoulder and tell him to wake up. He remarks: “They were just ordinary passersby, citizens doing their duty to the state” (135).

The Eyelid, in its very title, evokes that thin fold that separates wakefulness and dreaming. That veil between two worlds. “The world is an eyeball in space, which nothing projects” we are told near the end. That is, the world has been shorn of its lids, its means for dreaming, and thus the final space of personal freedom has been vanquished. And for those of us who, like our narrator, decide to rally against this great appropriation of dreaming, we may well find ourselves immersed in the same irony as the narrator: he becomes so busy running his Narcopolis as a merchant of sleep that he has no time for sleeping. In a telling statement: “My eyelid twitched uncontrollably” (127).

I hope you consider getting a copy of this thought-inducing little book, and I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing little book. Not sure I could fully get into focus what was happening, but it did appear to be an allegory on media intrusion (especially of social media)
The back cover blurb not only misrepresents the book as a science genre piece but also mentions a plot point (not that plot is really the point here anyway) that occurs about 3/4 of the way through

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel explores the act of dreaming, in both the literal sense (daydreaming and nighttime) and figuratively (e.g. "he had big dreams"). Set in a near-future where the entire world has come under the control of the totalitarian, hyper-capitalist Greater America (the story takes place in Paris), our protagonist is guided by his mentor, the mysterious Ambassador Chevauchet of the Republic of Onirica, into a resistance movement that seeks to reclaim the interior freedom and private rest and repose that are the gifts of sleep. Lacking this time alone with one's thoughts, daydreams suffer as well, and the possibilities for a new world can no longer be imagined. There are some echoes here of 1984 with the attempts at cognitive control (via the literal erasure of words in Orwell's book, so that dissent can no longer be articulated), though the tone is much more subdued. My only criticism is that Chrostowska, an academic, gets a bit carried away at times with the literary and intellectual references.

Picked up as an ARC at the 2020 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autumn, a collective slumbering, a somewhat lumbering slumbering, Autumn itself a lumbering lingerer, a season handed to dreams and dreamers, capable apparently of indefinitely extending its stay. “Drowsy, practically dozing on their feet, they let their lids droop low enough to screen their dreams, with half an eye still on the noir of reality. In autumn, such absences and bifocal vision come naturally, spreading like an insuppressible yawn.” In her experimental, epistolary, and essayistic novel PERMISSION—the only book-length work I had read by S.D. Chrostowska before getting to THE EYELID, her latest novel and first book for Toronto’s Coach House—the female author of the emails of which the novel is comprised addresses an addressee whose non-responsiveness is an explicit precondition for the continuation of the emails. The writer expresses the belief that part of what her and her chosen (practically hijacked) addressee have in common is, as she sees it, a living grasp of Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the obscurity of language and the clarity of things. Blanchot is likewise invoked on the back cover of Dalkey Archive's edition of PERMISSION, where a blurb/synopsis from Teju Cole mentions the French writer alongside Roland Barthes and Anne Carson. I was not far into THE EYELID when I began to think of Blanchot again. This short, crisp, exquisitely executed political fable, opposing as it does dream and reverie with an increasingly malevolent dystopian apparatus of wakeful suppression, begins with an unnamed narrator afield in a somnolent autumnal landscape. At the outset our narrator has experienced (and would seem to continue to experience) a prolonged period of indolence, unemployment, and a perhaps unusually fecund species of drowsiness. “It was on one of those wet afternoons, steps fugacious on decaying matter, that my constant reverie opened wider than usual.” The narrator, in due course, finds himself (we shall discover 'tis a he) seated upon on a bench, snow is falling, or perhaps cherry blossoms. “Smog clung to my hair as to my thoughts, and I do not rule out its effects on my biography.” The smog and the snow, or perhaps cherry blossoms, present as a form of distortion in the perceptual field, perhaps not unlike the snow on a television screen, the visual noise of failed signal, and the drowsy narrator reverts to reverie, “underneath my lids crystallized parallel landscapes and hours lengthened to years,” as the blurred landscape of the outside environment is displaced by a nebulously interior one, an inner beyond, though this beyond too cannot help but be hazy. Before the narrator and before the bench there is a serene body of water upon which there are two swans, a charged poetic image characteristic of the general mode of THE EYELID. One swan is black, one white. Swans’ eyes, necks entwined, a hypnagogic idyll. It is now that the reverie would properly appear to open “wider than usual”: out of practically nowhere, “I turned my head, I saw a small, unimposing man gazing out at the water.” The man is Chevauchet, diplomat, “Ambassador of the Free Republic of Onirica.” He will become our emissary and guide to the oneiric domain. It is hard not to think of these developments without thinking of how the legacy of Kafka passes through Maurice Blanchot. We might think for example of Blanchot’s second novel, 1942’s AMINADAB, which is not unlike a version of Kafka’s THE CASTLE set in but a mere few rooms of a single metaphysically slippery, labyrinthine building. In Kafka we have the ubiquity of uncanny meddlers, alone or often in pairs, who presume to guide the displaced protagonist but who tend only to further confound and dissemble. In AMINADAB, this unsettling emissary (or agent of an unsettled settlement) takes on the name of Dom (make of the sadomasochistic provenance of the name what you will). The instantaneously and uncannily materializing Chevauchet is THE EYELID’s version of Dom, and if Blanchot, writing amidst the conflagrations of the Second World War, updates Kafka so as to enact a fidelity to new metaphysical terrors endemic to a transformed political landscape (a landscape in which an urban residential building can rapidly become a mass grave), Chrostowska is doing something analogous, her specific field of survey one involving a 21st century characterized by matters pertaining to transsubjectivity, virtuality, and evolving systems of control. Chevauchet, the diplomat of dreamworld and dreamtime, is not merely one of Kafka’s impish intercessors. He is also Virgil to our narrator’s D. Alighieri, a felicitous parallel of which both learned parties are very much aware, their likewise being able to connect their adventures back to the Isle of Dreams as apprised by Lucian of Samosata and before him Homer. There are elements too of Lewis Carroll afoot, Italo Calvino likewise. Though a diplomat and thus ensconced in bureaucracy and the quotidian mandates of governmental instrumentality, Chevauchet very frequently presents as an outright radical, practically insurrectionist in his commitment to the emancipatory potential of nighttime dreams and daytime reveries. An early declaration from the fellow: “Thanks to dreams, the strange glimpses they offer, we have at least a notion of freedom.” Chevauchet and our narrator embark on a number of picaresque adventures afield in dream. Cleanly severed fingers appear like éclairs, dreamers are witnessed threading through crowd scenes in there own dreams. The novel is composed entirely of short oblique chapters in which temporal considerations, if not seasonal ones, are all but suspended in the mist. Chevauchet wants to create “an alternative network and community of dreamers.” He believes in a radically connected and participatory transsubjective dreamspace. “Where real life demanded passports, here only a passe-partout would do. All should enjoy right of passage through the dreams and daydreams of others.” Additionally: “since dreams neither really belonged nor were original to us, a dream-community ought to be possible.” The oneiric world and the prosaic waking reality are at either side of a liminal threshold that is not an explicit place or a matter of clearly delineated domains, their separation determined or determinable. Much of the landscape traversed within the novel is an explicitly Parisian geography, and surely we can attribute this to Chrostowska’s academic pedigree and areas of focus. “Utopia was quite simply the totality of dissonant dreams and poetic traditions, chief among them being Romanticism and Surrealism. These utopian currents awoke latent myths containing values of the unjustly silenced, the vanquished—values that any oppressed could claim and incarnate, bringing to life in such manner past struggles and lost causes, redeeming them.” To André Breton and the Surrealists we owe the modern emergence of a tradition that places the liberated oneiric realm within the labyrinthine street of Paris, perhaps especially Montmartre, a neighbourhood right out of Kafka or Borges. THE EYELID likewise invokes directly the psychogeography of the Situationists and madhouse luminaries the likes of Maurice Ravel, Antonin Artaud, and Gérard de Nerval, along with the spooky ecstasies of Teresa of Ávila. The libertine rebellions represented by the Marquis de Sade may be harbingers of the oneiric ones to come, and the spectre of the French Revolution and the Bastille itself may well appear cryptically in a homage to the black swan provided by Baudelaire. Chrostowska’s utilization of the concept of reverie comes to us directly from Gaston Bachelard and THE POETICS OF SPACE. In the intersubjective dreamsystem, a kind of manipulable program, historical sequence is no longer sequential, but rather an efflorescence of new simultaneities. We have, however, already established that THE EYELID is a kind of political fable in which evolving systems of control have been said to figure. You see, a portable dream Paris or a waking real concrete Paris or of course both may be operative here, but they all exist within a singular global state model called “Greater America.” Obviously if Onirica, for which Chevauchet is the ambassador, has an embassy and therefore exists relationally within the extant geopolitical apparatus, then this diplomacy exists as a bridge between Onirica and Greater America. They are not, however, separate territories, Onirica being immanent to Greater America, something like a working unconscious, an underside or flipside, in the power and purpose of which Chevauchet believes wholeheartedly. Within the systems and structures of Greater American, its institutions committed to an ideology of wakefulness and productivity, we find also a perverse double for the aforementioned “alternative network and community of dreamers.” This is the Comprehensive Illusion (CI), a circumscribed virtual space where individuals can participate in regulated quasi-oneiric activities which abide by the mandates of productivity and commerce, obviously analogous to the internet and virtual reality, attractive because designed expressly to be so (“Daydreaming in cyberspace was assisted and augmented; it was easier”). The powers that be within Greater America have increasingly found ways to suppress reverie in service to an instrumentalized collective daydreaming, but these institutional powers have their eyes set beyond the novel’s autumn, toward more draconian seasons. A hellish eternal summer looms, everybody will be permanently awake, aided by a drug called Potium facilitating unending workdays and permanent productivity. Chevauchet and the narrator must wrestle with the question of how the emancipatory power of dreams might be carried forward into the status quo realm to which the sleeper must invariably awaken. May all your dreams come to, so to speak, but may they also go on to DO. Crucial here, they believe, is the catalyst of hope. Hope must be the kernel or germ of meaningful reverie, the “leaven turning dreams into ascendants, into ‘rising signs.’” Chevauchet will disappear, but our narrator will become an oneiric dissident, going literally underground, again operating from an immanent underside or flipside, making use of networks of caverns (that regularly produce sinkholes), a rhizomatic mole, initiator of “Operation Dormitory.” Chrostowka’s novel would appear to lead to something like the manifestation of a revolutionary or emancipatory praxis, albeit a perhaps tenuous one. First of all and above all we have that title, THE EYELID, and its evocation of a provisional screen, a liminal threshold that opens and closes upon the eye, projects vision inward or outward. They eyelid is a screen in a double sense, in that it is a screen that closes over the eye and also a screen upon which dreams are projected in something approaching a cinematographic sense. The eye and different screens reappear throughout the novel. Early on we have an incidental simile: “how water closes around a sinking object like an eyelid.” Later, when Comprehensive Illusion is being addressed, the narrator insists that “Information was spectacle, mass entertainment, a constant screen interposed between world and mind.” This is the Greater American orthodoxy, the exploitation of the oneiric, the engineering of the ludic domain, and here the “screen between world and mind” is itself a kind of eyelid or liminal threshold, but in this case one that is mediated by technicians and agents of governmentality. If Chrostowska’s novel opposes a heterogeneous, plural, and wildly dynamic “alternative network and community of dreamers” of the sort espoused by Chevauchet with the mediated CI realm in which the network of “users” are opiated, pacified, and effectively neutered, perhaps even lobotomized, this may not strike us as entirely satisfactory insofar as pertains to its ability to reflect the actual reality of interactive virtual spaces at this moment in history. I see cyberspace as every bit as much a heterogeneous realm of raucous, multivalent difference as I would a theoretical unmediated oneiric space of free interchange and fluid relations, though this is not to say that I fail to ascertain the fundamentally dystopian nature of the internet. A large part of how I see this stuff working exists in what I believe to be the erroneous use of the words “polarized” or “polarization” with regard to online communication. I see online communication as extremely odious for the most part, but I also see it as truly heterogeneous, such that where others see polarization (us vs. them, cleanly delineated tribalistic dialectics) I see atomization, discord, chaos, and as many world views as there are consumers. Right now, as June of 2020 commences, we are witnessing August 1968-scale upheavals in more than twenty American cities. Earlier this evening I saw a friend online post about opposing political factions and how “we” shouldn’t give up the fight to control the narrative because “we” have the winning hand. I know my friend means well, but I also immediately understood that he spoke for no “we” independent perhaps of the molecular multiplicity constituted by the person he himself was at the moment he typed the word. I interpret our current historical moment as a calibrated Theatre of Chaos controlled by no one but reliant upon a managerial class and exploitable by cults of personality. This is, I believe, the principle salient theme of Adam Curtis’s increasingly prophetic-seeming 2016 documentary HYPERNORMALISATION. CI existed more insidiously at the beginning of the 21st century, back when I was in grad school. Not having cable television, I would go into seminars and marvel at how all my peers were eerily speaking the same programmatic language. That never happens anymore, my peers all appearing to be independent monads, their individual syllabi individually curated by algorithms. Nobody is on the same page; leave two people alone together in extended isolation and the fact will become clear to both of them fairly quickly. That being said, what clearly separates CI (or the actual internet) for the utopian project it could have been (or could perhaps be on some flipside) is that it very much is a matter of systems and structures within Greater America or its transnational equivalent. Late in THE EYELID, the narrator presents us with an aphorism: “Nighttime was for revolution.” It reminds me a bit of the chilling aphorism repeated a couple times in THE LOST WEEKEND, Charles Jackson’s masterful novel about alcoholism: “Delirium is a disease of the night.” Might we consider for a moment the efficacy of a delirium revolution? I would argue that Chrostowska is in large part doing just that. Her political fable may lead to organized revolt, but clearly, in its thematization and its execution, the work itself is about an intensive communicable poetics as its own praxis.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Eyelid is something along the lines of 1984 or Fahrenheit 451. Think a near-future dystopia where a government holds a monopoly on creativity. They implement an officially sanctioned VR program, criminalize sleep, and distribute a sort of insomnia pill to everyone. The pill is optional but you can imagine what happens if someone opts not to take it.

It's a good springboard for thought and discussion, but for me the presentation fell flat. It's the dense prose here that gets in the way. I'm thinking Ligotti or Lovecraft, and while that style can work exceptionally well in horror/weird fiction, I think a more transparent stylistic approach would have fit this better. The general conceit actually brought to mind Lisa McMann's The Unwanteds, a middle grade fantasy series, and got me thinking I'd rather be rereading that. It's got essentially the same talking points but with that unabashed genre-steeped propulsion going for it.

Still, The Eyelid is worth a read, and it's not like it'll take up weeks of your time.

[Tammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This author has a beautiful way with words, often reading almost like poetry. She uses constant references to history and fables and other literature. I’m sure I missed most of them. There are so many applications from this story to our lives. The one I identified with the most: the correlation with today’s evil fusion of capitalism with the Protestant work ethic.

[Raoul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A visionary tale of a dystopian future that might come to pass in these times of total mobilisation. Bonus: magnificently written!

[Slow Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very quick and engrossing book, though it reads better as theory-fiction than as fiction per se, and ultimately its didactic elements, when translucified, reveal Jonathan Crary, Liebnitz, Baudrillard, and Deleuze more than they do the opalescent riches of Balzac, Calvino, Breton. The first 30 pages however are terrific surrealism: dominoed swans strangled by their long downy necks is quite the rêverie. One huge boon, as well, is that Chrostowska's fatidic premonitions are all likely true -- dreaming is the final refuge. Virtual realities for the downtrodden and stimulated sleep for the comfortable would mean the absolute death of imagination

[Didier Vanoverbeke · Rating 2 out of 5]

What we're dealing with here, it seems, is a piece of 'idea literature', as the Flemish might call it. Speculative fiction, maybe, though not completely outside the realm of the imaginable. So far so great. The presentation leaves a lot to be desired, at least for me. What's with the slightly baroque prose? And because the world presented here is some not-too-distant speculative distopic, why am I not more intrigued by it? In short, why am I bored to tears by a 144-page booklet? Even Viktor Shklovsky sometimes causes a chuckle.

[Read Wilder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book put me to sleep--the highest compliment, I hope, I can give. It was deep and vital and nourishing.

As much reverie and philosophy as novel, the Eyelid revolves around sleep: its metaphysics, its exploitation and demonization, its revolutionary possibilities. Through meditations on sleeping and dreaming, it considers the relationship between imagination and action and demonstrates the interests that the powers-that-be have in constraining our ability to envision alternative worlds (probably ones in which they don't exist) through sleep. We can only do what we can imagine and at a time when we must work incessantly to survive, when we have come to hate idleness as unproductive, when a deluge of pre-fabricated images overwhelms our inner eyes, we have little time for dreaming and find our horizons for radical change also limited.

I don't claim through this book to have overcome my resentment of sleep or the itching suspicion that I would be more "productive" (already a misguided way of thinking) if I were only to deprive myself of another hour of rest. But I do feel that I have a resource, a way of thinking, that can unite my waking and dreaming selves, that can help me appreciate my sleeping as a valuable part of my life, instead of an urgent, but regrettable, detraction from it. In the future, I hope to rest easy.

[Snuffy Spiderlegs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is long on Leftist philosophy and short on narrative. It comes across more like a Situationist exercise than an actual story. Recommended for people who find Guy Debord lucid and folks who enjoy looking up new words every other page.

[Tina Olah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars. Full review coming soon!

[Sebastian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too poetic for me. Worth trying later if my reading tastes change a bit.

[Dora · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was really beautifully written but it was too literary for my taste.

[Margaryta · Rating 4 out of 5]

REVIEW FORTHCOMING

[Zak]

for school

[Stephanie H · Rating 3 out of 5]

When sleep is first abhorred and eventually outlawed, an anonymous narrator and their mentor try to save dreams and dreamers from a world without repose. This book reads like a dream. Sometimes disjointed and hard to follow, at other times it is fluid and almost linear. While it definitely has an interesting concept, this book is at times too heavy and intellectual. Even though it was very short, it felt like a long book.

Got an ARC of this book at the OLA Super Conference