What to read this week, from the abyss of dreams to an architectural manifesto

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Sleep Has His House by Anna Kavan

“Dreamlike” is a term often ascribed to strange, hallucinatory fiction, but the 1948 novel Sleep Has His House from the mysterious British writer Anna Kavan can truly lay claim to some hidden truths about the unruly subconscious mind as we sleep. The book is divided into two unequal parts – daytime and night: the former stripped of plot and detail; the latter an inside-out world of tigers padding on “fierce fine velvet feet” and an unspooling abyss that is as hard to recount as a dream itself. In her review, Eimear McBride finds much to admire in Kavan’s singular vision, untainted by the trends of her contemporaries. As she writes, “There is no ideological influence on her writing, no popular sentiment perforating her insight and no grovelling whatsoever before the sacred cows of her time – which is every bit as refreshing, and curative, as the agonised beauty of her prose.”
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WHAT TO READ NEXT

Architecture Against Architecture: A Manifesto by Reinier de Graaf

Is architecture, in its current form, a force for good? Despite the prevailing belief that is the case, Reiner de Graaf makes a compelling rebuttal in this new manifesto that details various issues that have embroiled the industry, from low pay and sexual abuse scandals to the twin spectres of AI and the climate emergency. De Graaf is a partner at the Rotterdam-based practice OMA, where he has been involved in projects including The Line, the ill-fated 100-mile linear city in the Saudi Arabian desert, driven by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. From this insider position, De Graaf puts forward the architect’s dilemma: who with power and wealth is going to commission architects to work against the interests of power and wealth? As Rowan Moore says in his review. “If you accept your corporate client’s dollar, you lose your freedom to challenge the values that they embody.”
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I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken

Seven years ago, a stroke left the American poet Richard Siken paralysed on his right side and struggling with his speech and memory. His debilitating condition prompted him to reconsider his writing style, moving away from using line breaks to create emphasis in favour of the simpler form of the paragraph. The result is his new collection, I Do Know Some Things, which spans family legacies, cults and mental breakdown. It’s a dazzling return to form 20 years after his electric debut, Crush. “In their propulsiveness, narrative strategies and image-making, [the poems] are frequently startling,” our reviewer Chris Power writes. “I found the book difficult to put down, and when it was finished I soon wanted to return.”
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ENDNOTES

This week, Anthony Cummins interviews Gwendoline Riley, whose new novel, The Palm House, is released today. He shares some additional insight from their meeting:

Riley and I went to adjacent secondary schools in Wirral, Merseyside – we didn't know each other – and when I dangled a theory about the area's growing visibility in her work, she put on the twang of Ethan Hawke in Before Midnight (“To answer that would take the piss out of the whole thing”). She savoured my slip when I referred to a character in her brilliant new novel, The Palm House, as Edward (“Edmund”), speaking straight into my recorder when I asked what she had learned since making her debut at 23 (“Gwendoline screws up her face”). Later, at home, I looked up some of the words she used during our conversation (“banausic”, “appetitive”) while searching YouTube for the Granada Television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, whose set Riley visited as a child: the two lines of dialogue that she enthusiastically voiced for me – unprompted, verbatim – came from an episode first broadcast 40 years ago, when she was six or seven.
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Illustration by Charlotte Durance