Many of us will occasionally find ourselves quivering beneath our duvets, listening to the faintest of sounds in the dead of night, creating stories and imagining untold horrors that may or may not unfold. The mind will easily entertain itself when external stimulation is sparse, seeing faces in the shadows and hearing voices in the wind. The experience of not knowing whether we are sleeping or waking is common, or of time slowing down when we are daydreaming, or being jolted back to reality by a sound that infiltrates our dream world.
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chief Bromden tells his story of life in a state psychiatric hospital in Oregon, USA. Here, nightmares and reality are inextricably entwined and the reader is often challenged to find the dividing line between halluc ination and observation. Thankfully, this dark and disconcerting cocktail of a book is also equally irreverent, hilarious and ultimately illuminating. The Chief’s right-hand man frequently grabs us from our angstridden slumbers and laughs in our face.
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