This is a nice collection of short stories. I particularly enjoyed Floatsam, Rafe’s Coat, Days, and A Lesson in Traveling Light. If I understood it correctly one story, which has the same title as the collection, tells the story of a woman who falls asleep for several hundred hours (how many hundreds is left for the reader to decide). Reading that story felt kind of like how waking up after such a long snooze would feel: kind of disorienting. This sensation applied to most of the stories in the collection, but not in an awful way. I’m feeling too lazy right now to write more, but I might come back to some of these stories again to see how they feel after having etched some grooves in my brain. Maybe I’ll write more then.
The collection is also full of really nice sentences. On dozens of occasions I marked sentences with the intent to submit them to Perfect Sentences (a delightful newsletter that you should subscribe to). For example—
“You’re sentient protoplasm, but you’re as undifferentiated as sntient protoplasm can get. You’re devoid of even taxonomic attributes.” (Flaotsam)
His face looked slippery and white, like a bathroom tile. (Floatsam)
“Tell me, dear,” Cookie shouted tactlessly, “what’s it like to be a bitch!” (Rafe’s Coat)
Eventually I distinguished Martia Meaver’s name in a stream of syllables that issued from some source not far from me. Naturally, my curiosity was arroused. (Rafe’s Coat)
But in fact Kathy can also, when the elevator stops in front of us, tell whether it’s on its way up or down. (Days)