![]() She sleeps for 17 years, allowing much space for Coupland's insights into contemporary culture (in particular the pre-millennial mindset), and meditations on time, friendship and lost love. Nine months after the fateful (on several levels) night, she gives birth to a daughter. who, a few hours after her deflowering (atop Vancouver's Grouse Mountain) plunges into a coma due to a near-lethal mix of pills and alcohol. One of my favourite Coupland books, the novel (the title is cribbed from a song by the Smiths) centres on 17-year-old Karen. Girlfriend in a Coma (HarperCollins, 1998). The waking of a similar Sleeping Beauty is the key to Douglas Coupland's novel As Sacks writes in the conclusion to the case study of Rose R., a consummate flapper prior to succumbing to the illness, "she is a Sleeping Beauty whose 'awakening' was unbearable to her, and who will never be awoken again." L-DOPA carried with it a variety of negative side effects that resulted, too often, in conditions worse than the legacy of the sleeping sickness. Tragically, many of these real-life awakenings were short-lived. While Grzebski missed the fall of communism, Van Winkle slept through the American Revolution, which he discovers when he declares his allegiance to King George following his return to his much-changed village. Perhaps the most striking parallel between Van Winkle and Grzebski (aside from the two decades of sleep) is the momentous nature of the political changes that occurred during their respective slumbers. His wife is dead, his children grown and, like Grzebski, he finds himself with unexpected grandchildren. (Despite its cultural familiarity, the story bears rereading: It's a delight.) After a dreamlike evening in the mountains, Van Winkle lies down to sleep, only to wake up 20 years later. ![]() The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent - about the amiable though somewhat work-shy New England villager who, to escape from his henpecking wife, wanders into the nearby Catskills. Everyone is familiar with the broad strokes of Washington Irving's 1819 short story - part of a collection of essays, It has also been compared, perhaps inevitably, to that of Rip Van Winkle. Good Bye Lenin!, in which a woman wakes from a coma in a changed East Germany, while her son attempts to preserve the illusion that her beloved communism is still the prevailing ideology. Grzebski's story has been compared to the 2003 German film comedy, Most important, he woke to 11 grandchildren, all born while he was comatose. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and he woke to well-stocked grocery stores (with nary a ration card in sight), cellphones, iPods and a dizzying consumer culture. ![]() The Poland he knew - locked under the rule of the Soviet Union and Communist president Wojciech Jaruzelski, subject to food shortages and rationing - had vanished while he slept. He spent 19 years in a coma, awakening this month to a world utterly changed. In 1988, the 46-year-old railway worker was injured when he fell in front of a train at work. As a result, this rather frustrating album has its high points (the fractured stop-time verses of "Sackcloth in Ashes" are admittedly pretty cool, though the lyrics suggest they don't quite have their Biblical idioms entirely down), but the overall feel is that of a modern indie rock version of Abacab-era Genesis: fairly appealing pop songs dressed up with prog rock fripperies that end up making it all sound kind of pretentious.The dramatic potential inherent in the action of awakening was displayed earlier this month with the story of Jan Grzebski. Giving their debut album two separate, unrelated titles for no apparent reason (the ten songs don't appear to form a pair of interconnected suites or anything like that), the quartet dress up fairly standard issue pop-punk tunes with math rock noodling, showy time-signature changes, and dynamic shifts into unnecessarily complicated B sections that do little more than negate the energetic heads of steam that they had worked up beforehand. Or at least, those seem to be the options that Mesa, AZ's Small Leaks Sink Ships went with. Similarly, when a band can't decide if they want to ape the neo-prog of the Mars Volta or the angsty but straightforward pop-punk of Green Day's American Idiot, one solution is to try to tackle both at once. Apparently, one solution when a band can't decide on a title for their debut album is to simply graft two of the leading contenders together with a semicolon.
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