This book didn't work for me, even though I am a Nino Ricci fan. The main character suffers from a sleep disorder, and becomes dependent on prescription drugs, which he abuses. The story is told in sections, often with a jump in time between them, and I had trouble making connections. I would have liked to better understand David's condition; instead, the book read more like an action thriller. ( )

Nino Ricci is one of the best writers working today. He is a cultured and adventurous storyteller who writes on a global stage and whose novels are successful at engaging the reader both viscerally and intellectually. Sleep tells the story of David Pace, author and professor of Classical Studies. David's early career triumphs have been founded on his daring and ground-breaking first book, Masculine History. Since its publication, which made him something of a celebrity in academic circles, and even though he is struggling to write a follow-up, David has built a solid reputation as a scholar and lecturer. However, because of a sleep disorder, his life has started to unravel. His doctor has prescribed a cocktail of drugs to regulate and control the problem, but David has developed a dependency, which he hides from his doctor and denies to himself. When sleep deprivation and a habit of over-medicating affect his behaviour, causing him to become impulsive, moody and reckless (this on top of an ego easily bruised by slights both real and imagined and an infantile need for praise--attributes he shares with his academic colleagues), he becomes impossible both to live with and to work with. He splits from his wife, loses contact with his son, and an incident with a young female colleague makes him a pariah at the university where he teaches. Cut loose from stabilizing influences, things go from bad to worse. With his life already veering dangerously out of control, a chance incident brings him into contact with firearms, and his fascination with guns grows to fill his leisure time. In subsequent chapters, David behaves badly and makes one poor choice after another. His story sputters to an end in the bullet-riddled back streets of some war-ravaged third-world dictatorship where he's gone to collect material for a book he claims aloud to anyone who'll listen he's going write on the end of civilization, but which he realizes will probably never be completed. Ricci makes it impossible to like or sympathize with his protagonist. David's disorder excuses his reprehensible behaviour to some extent, but over and over again he proves himself utterly lacking in empathy and interested in only one thing: feeding his own appetites. Even among the secondary characters—David's shrill wife Julia, his smug and fatuous brother, his paranoid and predatory colleagues—it's hard to find anyone worthy of admiration. For all this, the book is compulsively readable. Ricci's prose is assured and memorable, filled with searing observations on modern life and vividly imagined descriptive passages. In Sleep, Nino Ricci takes a huge risk by building a story around a self-destructive, unprincipled philanderer. But the novel keeps us guessing and firmly in its grip until last page, proving that this author is capable of anything. ( )

Ricci has either put a lot of a lot of research into the condition of his protagonist David Pace or he is quite familiar personally with the circumstances of insomnia. Whatever the case may be, he has documented an important element of the human condition in this book. Readers could be easily reading about themselves as they follow Pace go from a successful academic and family man meltdown to a slave to his emotions and medications.

http://tinyurl.com/j6bd5gv ( )