Lars Boye Jerlach

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.… (més)

“That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony.”

We are in nineteenth century New England with a gravedigger by the name of Ambrosius Moerk. He’s handed a batch of letters written in Danish; he has a series of magical encounters with, among others, a young lady, a monk and various animals, most notably cats. But this is but the outer shell. When All The Days Have Gone is a deeply inward journey of the spirit, a novel reminding me of the writing of none other than that German romantic, Hermann Hesse. Thus the above quote from Hesse’s novel Gertrude is very much in keeping with this fine imaginative yarn by Danish born, American author Lars Boye Jerlach.

Reading Hermann Hesse in my early twenties, I had the distinct feeling his poetic words were graceful markers for one’s own self-discovery. Likewise, with Lars' novel. Thus I have linked my own musings with several direct quotes from the book:

“He found that the longer he stared at the images the further he was from understanding them. There was no florid fragrance, no corporeality of tactility, exuding from the two dimensional plane, the fact that he could find absolutely nothing alive in the painting, and yet they had an unnatural almost spellbinding grip on him that he found both mysterious and inexplicable, as he had never been especially interested in the world of flora.” ---------- The flora spoken of here are flowers portrayed in Flemish oil paintings. A warmhearted aunt would take young Ambrosius on educational tours of Copenhagen’s Museum of Art. Through a number of passages, such as “When looking at real flowers, he could hardly distinguish one from another, but when faced with a painting he found himself drawn to counting the number of petals in a crown or the number of leaves on a stem.” we are given a glimpse of the ways a youngster first awakens to his own calling as an artist.

“He discovered that he was most intrigued by the smaller nondescript assemblies of feathers or tufts of fur. If there were any recognizable parts of the animal left or the smell of decay was still polluting the air, the image on the ground immediately lost its appeal and he never found the urge to sketch it.” ---------- Young Ambrosius recollects those penetrating memories of his out in the natural world, with animals especially, as a first step in transforming powerful experience into art. Sidebar: Another common ground with Hermann Heese: Lars Boye Jerlach is also a visual artist.

“You’re absolutely right,” she said, “The most intricate parts of the mind are indeed a dangerous maze full of pitfalls and perilousness not to be shared lightly and believe me when I say that there are a lot of thoughts in the world that are better left alone in the deepest darkest depths of their lairs never to see the light of day.” ----------- A captivating lass the age of Lewis Carroll’s Alice appears to Ambrosius Moerk when he is walking through the woods. This mysterious presence brings to mind the girl from Arthur Machen’s tale The White People with her knowledge of secret wisdom and nature cults echoing the worlds of Gnosticism and shamanism. And let’s not forget the English translation of the gravedigger’s last name is "mørk" as in dark, black. Very appropriate recognizing the depth of the main character’s metaphysical and psychological probings.

“A talking ship’s cat that for reasons unknown had promised the author the impossible gift of time, the author’s outlandish dream and his realization that the cat could read his mind was not only unbelievable, but surely the ravings of a deeply disturbed man. Yet, there was something about the order in which the letters had ben written and the honesty of the writer that for some reason or other made the narrative seem less ridiculous.” ---------- But one of the cats with special, otherworldly gifts casting its spell in the tale. Cats have long been connected to magic going back to the time of the ancient Egyptians. And through the medieval period cats were more directly viewed as occult messengers and a witch frequently kept a black cat as a companion to act as her familiar.

“As he was close to stepping off the precipice to lose himself in the efficacious coital vortex that would suck him to the endless bottom, he heard an innominate voice originating from somewhere near the center of his mind. “I wanted you to know that we can share each other’s dreams,” it said. He let himself go and was instantaneously lost in the vehement multisensory maelstrom.” ---------- ---------- I include this quote here to highlight the author’s luscious, lyrical writing. I highly recommend you treat yourself to When All The Days Have Gone.


Author Lars Boye Jerlach at a bookstore in Maine.… (més)

* Disclaimer-The fact that Lars is one of my friends in Goodreads has nothing to do with my opinion of the book. I was interested in The Somnambulist's Dreams before Lars' invitation. Every opinion and comment is entirely my own.*

''There was no denying it was lonesome.''

Few situations in life are lonelier than living in a lighthouse. How quiet it must be when the only thing you hear is the sound of the waves. How dark and frightening when a storm is raging and the human being is but an insignificant dot amidst the fighting elements. All these constitute the perfect environment for the birth of dreams, visions and hallucinations.

The current lighthouse keeper on the coast of New England finds a collection of his predecessor's disjointed, weird writings. The man, whose name is Enoch Soule, claims to be a somnambulist, one who engages in sleepwalking (''somnia'' means ''dreams'' in Latin) and Enoch states that these writings are the dreams he's having night after night. The letters are addressed to his wife. This is the premise of this highly unusual and fascinating book.

There are so many questions that arise from the first pages of the novel. Are Enoch's dream actual dreams or are they hallucinations? And, taking it to the extreme, is he shape-shifting or even teleporting? Hard to make any assumptions and that is what I really enjoyed in Lars' book. There are symbols and cryptic elements that force your mind to work in great speed as you read to try and uncover anything similar to an answer.

The central symbol is the lighthouse. It rules over absolute darkness, it provides light in the midst of danger upon the troubled waves, it protects sailors by shielding them from certain death. For me, the lighthouse keepers stand there like the guardians of life, of safety and, perhaps, of a different knowledge and perception of the world. Then, comes the raven. The raven is the heart of the story, it provides the major element of magical realism, even surrealism, and acts like a crossover between Poe's Nevermore and Odin's Huginn and Muninn. Thus, the raven keeps all the answers to life and observes everything. Yet, it discloses nothing.

The dreams create striking images as Enoch finds himself in Kenya, in Antarctica, in a cemetery full of Victorian Gothic features, in Space, in a cell, in a well. The story of the Taxidermist is my favourite. It is a haunting, nightmarish vision where the word ''ghosts'' is mentioned for the first time. This dream echoes Poe's dark tales directly.

The language is beautiful, communicating difficult questions in a powerful simplicity, working through dualities. Black and white, Darkness and Light, Death and Life. This antithesis is wonderfully depicted in the striking cover by Kyle Louis Fletcher. The current lighthouse keeper is -in my opinion- the most enigmatic presence in the book. We see Enoch's inner thoughts, strange as they are, but not once do we enter the mind of his successor who counts the silent minutes in his domain, and I found this particularly puzzling and fascinating. Edgar Allan Poe's presence is thoroughly felt during the narration and I also sensed an echo of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco's plays.

This is not an easy book, it won't give you answers, but will cause you to think and transport your mind into an apocalyptic world where nothing is as it seems...

''There is no winning or losing, only the eternal plasticity of the game itself.''… (més)