The Somnambulist’s Dreams by Lars Boye Jerlach is a unique lyrical odyssey, a tale at the intersection of existentialism, magical realism and postmodern minimalism, a saga of a lighthouse keeper in his isolation living through dream sequences as he reads and ponders entries written by one Enoch S. Soule to his wife Emily, entries with such titles as Kenya, The Antarctic, The Cemetery, The Musician, The Well, The Chess Player, The Actress, The Taxidermist, The Cell. Reading Jerlach's short novel I am reminded of passages in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, dreams recounted in Michel Leiris' Night as Day/Day as Night, and most especially the Edgar Allan Poe tale, Silence.

Since a number of keenly perceptive reviews have already been posted here, for the purposes of my own review, I will take out my jeweler’s loupe and zero in on several sections of Soule’s accounts and then share my own associations and reflections on each Dali-like surreal sequence. For, the more I read The Somnambulist’s Dreams, the more I feel this unique novel as an invittion to travel to wondrous, magical worlds of dreamscapes and dreamtime, of imaginings opening out to that point in space where parallel lines bend to meet at infinity. Here goes:

From: The Antarctic: When I opened my eyes, I was lying in the middle of the cold stone floor in the watch room with my arms spread out from my body. I was wearing my overcoat over my pajamas and my untied boots on my naked feet. I had on my hat and my gloves, and my scarf was wrapped tightly around the lower part of my face. I was, in truth, bewildered by the dream. ---------- Completely disoriented and lying in the middle of a cold stone floor – the famous opening of Poe’s tale The Pit and the Pendulum. I recall my own disorientation lying on a floor as a kid after I held my breath as my cousin squeezed my chest. My first introduction to altered states of consciousness. This happened in the same year, I was twelve at the time, when I witnessed an older woman pulled up on the beach, lying on the sand, having drowned from a heart attack. I must have been hallucinating since I clearly saw one of the first aid squad open her chest and, as if escaping from captivity, the woman’s ribs functioning as a birdcage, an entire flock of seagulls swirled up and circled overhead.

From The Musician: There were some large, extremely colorful prints on the walls. A couple of them were merely presenting an arrangement of lines or shapes, others where bizarre smeary portraits of women, conspicuously reminding me of clowns. On my irregular visits to the museum of art, I had never seen anything like it, and I couldn’t think of a living artist who could have produced work such as these. However, I did recognize a large print of a Campbell’s Soup can. ---------- Bizarre smeary portrait of women – ah, Willem de Kooning. And, of course, the Campbell Soup can is Andy Warhol’s iconographic pop art. No matter how unfamiliar and clown-like those modern abstract paintings, the familiar commercial cans and boxes for soups, cleaning pads and cereals can twist us in weird and wacky ways. I recall my own dream in my twenties when I was crushed when a giant Wheaties cereal box came crashing down on me.

From The Chess Player: The chess pieces where not of a design with which I was familiar. They were asymmetrical and quite outlandish looking and although I am a reasonably seasoned chess player, it was difficult for me to tell them apart. But the pieces and the board looked like they were carved from Ebony and Maple and the shadows cast from the large pieces fell on the checkered pattern, creating a series of narrow recondite bridges between them. ---------- One image has burned itself in my memory: As a teenager I was a member of a class club, mostly adults, mostly professionals. We would have our meetings and play our games at a lawyer’s house. On evening the lawyer opened a box and showed us his new chess set - each piece a slick, space-age design. A “space-age” chess set. The design haunted me and shortly thereafter I gave up playing chess and never came near the game since. I’ve never been able to figure out, then or now, how the combination of a futuristic design and a traditional ancient game cast such a spell.

From The Taxidermist: There were a couple of birds placed in sand filled frames on the ground. One of them I recognized as a guinea fowl, but the other one I hadn’t seen before. It was some type of Ibis. Its body was white, but its neck, downwards curved beak, long legs and rump feathers were all black as velvet. The head was turned and its neck was bent downwards, as if it was looking for something on the ground. ---------- Sounds like the inspiration for the novel’s cover! Also the cover from Irving Welsh’s Marabou Stork Nightmare, a novel containing one of the most unforgettable lines in all of literature: “I wasn’t born so much into a family as a genetic disaster.” Additionally, I can’t forget how as a kid riding my bicycle I came upon four turkey vultures, ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly, sitting up a fence along a country lane.

From The Cell: I got up from the stool, took two small steps forward and leant down to run my hand over the wall above the bed, were the inscriptions were most prevalent. Besides the many obscenities, both written and clearly delineated in drawings, one of the more intelligible inscriptions caught my eye. Although small, the lettering was concise and rather elegant. It looked like it could have been scraped into the wall with a needle or a very thin nail and the person who wrote it had obviously endeavored to arrange the sentences so that they aligned. ---------- Words appear on the stone above a door in an old section of the city for Harry Haller in Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. I’ve been waiting for those words to likewise appear for me at night during my walks. They haven’t yet, but at least I have my reading of The Somnambulist’s Dreams. Thanks, Lars!


Lars Boyle Jerlach - Danish born author and artist currently living in Portland, Maine, USA.