Cyrille Martinez, The Sleepworker. Trans by Joseph patrick Stancil, Coach House Pr4ess, 2014. excerpt (pdf)
read it at Google Books
John is a poet. Only John almost never writes poems, because he is also unemployed. He lives with two friends, and they squat in a loft in New York New York, a fantastical city that resembles the Big Apple, but also any other city where artists live. They throw fabulous parties and practice group sodomy. That is, until John meets Andy.
Andy is an artist. Well, he is if you define art as something that people don't want but the artist wants to give them anyway. His work includes the Double-Murder Gun, which is just as likely to kill the shooter as the intended victim. A gallery owner with Tourette syndrome 'discovers' his work and Andy is on his way to being famous. John, on the other hand, is hard at work at being unemployed, drinking all night and sleeping all day—which leaves him very little time for writing poems. Andy, watching him sleep, has an intriguing idea for a piece of art that he thinks will allow John to get paid for what he does best.
Using the story of Andy Warhol and John Giorno and their film Sleep as a starting point, The Sleepworker reads like a Warhol film on fast-forward.
'As New York, capital of the twentieth century, recedes from memory, it becomes more like Paris; we flock to it to pay tribute to the great things that once happened there. New York is now a miasma of apocryphal myths feasting on its own corpse. On these pages, Martinez spins hazy rumor and wilting gossip into blistering contemporary fiction, holding up Warhol's mirror to the myth of Warhol himself. The result is a delicious celebration of simulacra where, like New York New York itself, nothing is true, but everything is permitted.'— Kenneth Goldsmith
A satire of the real New York City, The Sleepworker opens with an examination of this mythos-drenched metropolis, alive with possibility. In a narrative voice that is both playful and snarky, Martinez introduces the city as a place where people seek acceptance into high society. Unemployed and uninterested in having a job, Andy and John do not fit into a culture that values work and business success. Readers are invited to share in the narrator's amusement as the protagonists pursue creative paths and try to establish themselves in a city that doesn't want them. Constricted by the expectations of New York New York, John and Andy struggle to strike a balance between being authentic artists and finding recognition for their art.
The Sleepworker is a tribute to a place and time that bred great people and events, as well as a humorous critique of a city that dreams of its past from a stagnating present. Whether readers know the relationship between Andy Warhol and John Giorno or are completely new to this piece of history, Martinez's book will enthrall. --Justus Joseph
LitReactor calls THE SLEEPWORKER 'a tiny jewel of a book':
Look, any book which features Andy Warhol jerking off in the shower has a place on my shelf. In addition to this unforgettable moment, The Sleepworker also made me laugh loud enough to alarm my household, being full of the kind of dry absurdity at which the French would win medals, were dry absurdity an Olympic sport. There’s a running joke about sneakers**, a gallery owner with Tourettes and a poetry recital which is so self-referential that it deserves a live reading by John Malkovich playing himself, playing John Malkovich.
But let’s pretend for a moment that I wasn’t the kind of child who performed surgery on her teddy bears so I could examine their innards. I won’t spoil The Sleepworker for you by poking at its delicate machinery. It’s a tiny jewel of a book, which anyone over-invested in the notion of Art will hate and everyone else will love.
Look, any book which features Andy Warhol jerking off in the shower has a place on my shelf. In addition to this unforgettable moment, The Sleepworker also made me laugh loud enough to alarm my household, being full of the kind of dry absurdity at which the French would win medals, were dry absurdity an Olympic sport. There’s a running joke about sneakers**, a gallery owner with Tourettes and a poetry recital which is so self-referential that it deserves a live reading by John Malkovich playing himself, playing John Malkovich.
But let’s pretend for a moment that I wasn’t the kind of child who performed surgery on her teddy bears so I could examine their innards. I won’t spoil The Sleepworker for you by poking at its delicate machinery. It’s a tiny jewel of a book, which anyone over-invested in the notion of Art will hate and everyone else will love.