The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next. | Pechorin’s Journal Ice, by Anna Kavan I’ve written before of how sometimes work, life generally, can wreck my reading of a book. A busy period, a week passes without a page turned, and suddenly a great book has become a chore. I don’t remember what’s going on or who the characters are or why the plot involves a chihuaha*. The book becomes staccato and dissolves into incoherence. Ice got interrupted. In terms of plot and character Ice is both extremely easy and unusually difficult to describe. So far so simple. In what becomes a template for the rest of the novel the narrator loses contact with the couple, but determines to pursue the woman, to rescue her. That’s why this novel is both easy to describe and yet difficult too. Soon nothing is fixed. I described the narrative here as fractured. Here, early on, the narrator is driving through steadily and rapidly worsening driving conditions: At the end of his drive the narrator finds the woman at home with her husband. What then is consistent? Like this:
An Excerpt From "The Late American Novel": The Best Books Will Be Written Long After You Are Dead This essay is from the new collection The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, co-edited by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee, of The Millions. In the book, Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, Nancy Jo Sales and many others consider the landscape as the literary world faces a sudden change in the way we buy, produce and read books. Say it was 1910, and say on a breezy day you stopped me on Broadway, and say you asked me: “Sir, whither American letters?” And say that the answer I gave you was fantastically correct. “Hum! “Sir,” I would have said, “You can bide your time with Moby-Dick.” “I have never heard of any such thing.” “Moby-Dick! “No, no, no. We would have tipped hats, dodged the horse carriages, gone our ways—and although everything I told you would have been true, none of it would have improved your breezy day. But it is not 1910. It is 2010. And here we are on Broadway, and the day is balmy. Or whatever. Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn.
Agamben, Anna Kavan (irreparable) A passing theological moment… what will happen after the final universal judgement – will celestial bodies end ? Will animals and plants vanish into memory ? The difficulty that these questions pose themselves against is that it assumes the world was ordered to fit the dignity and habitation of humans, can it then exist after the humans leave for their transcendence. How can nature exist ? World's Greatest Novellas A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. While there is some disagreement as to what length defines a novella, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000. Although the novella is a common literary genre in several European languages, it is less common in English. English-speaking readers may be most familiar with the novellas of John Steinbeck, particularly Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, George Orwell's Animal Farm, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
#1 A Charmed Circle, Anna Kavan Marooned in a country house in an ugly manufacturing town is an old vicarage of which expensive improvements have been undertaken. The house sits in the middle of the town where traffic buzz is accentuated by occasional rumbling of passing trams. So much that it is separated by high walls and trees and is encroached by the hustle-and-bustle, it is a lonely ark itself–or at least the occupants intend it to be. Steered by the father’s morbidly morose, withdrawn and sinister nature, the Deanes immerse in a safe, profound secrecy of those in whom no one is interested. Life is meticulously edited to ensure minimal interruption of routine and to discourage any social intrusion of visitors. Fettered by some mental disability and limitation are the young Deanes who rebel and struggle to leave. The family reaches a tacit understanding that Beryl, who sets her heart on leaving the house, is held responsible for this hostility that reigns the house.
The 100 Best Books of All Time Many publishers have lists of 100 best books, defined by their own criteria. This article enumerates some lists of "100 best" books for which there are fuller articles. Among them, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (Xanadu, 1985) and Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels (Grafton, 1988) are collections of 100 short essays by a single author, David Pringle, with moderately long critical introductory chapters also by Pringle. For publisher Xanadu, Science Fiction was the first of four "100 Best" books published from 1985 to 1988. The sequels covered crime & mystery, horror, and fantasy. Lists[edit] See also[edit] References[edit]
Anna Kavan: Asylum Piece (1940) Anna Kavan (1901–68) was born Helen Woods, although she initially wrote as Helen Ferguson, her married name. Following the failure of her second marriage and one of many nervous breakdowns she changed her name to Anna Kavan, the main character of her novel Let Me Alone (1930). Asylum Piece is a collection of short stories which her publisher Peter Owen describes as 'mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical'. The cover shows Karl Theodor Bluth, the doctor who prescribed Kavan's heroin and co-wrote The Horse's Tail (1949) with her. The first story is 'The Birthmark', in which the unnamed first person narrator begins by describing going to boarding school at the age of fourteen. She has a sudden and inexplicable feeling of compassion for one of the other girls, H, who shows her a birthmark on her arm which has a pointed, circular shape with a tiny object inside that might be a rose. The final brief story is 'There Is No End', and the paranoia continues, apparently for ever.
Anna Kavan "I am Lazarus" - Spoiler! The short story "The Brother" is another stunner. The narrator talks of being a sickly child, well taken care of by his mother while his brother is hardy and beautiful. He tells us that he has great regret about his treatment of his brother. He was always quarrelsome and hid behind his illnesses to be unkind to his brother and his friends. The love the narrator got from his mother, he was entitled to because he needed to be taken care of, being sick often and unable to get around. He gets a bought of flu and gives it to his brother, though he assures us that his brother was only mildly effected by the illness. The brother gets pneumonia, his mother commands the narrator attend the death bed. The fearful sound of his breathing was so loud that it seemed to be insidemy head. What does he mean? The silence between us became intolerable and I stammered something intendedfor consolation, saying that at least we still had each other. How chilling is that??? Is this what we do? Kavan, Anna.
The Strange Case of Anna Kavan The first blog entry I ever wrote had something to do with Anna Kavan; I think I was reading her book "Let Me Alone" at the time. I've just finished George Saunder's "In Persuasion Nation" -- funny, cynical, nasty, and ultimately touching -- and tonight, waiting anxiously for a thunderstorm that is taking its own sweet time arriving, I'm following it up with Kavan's "Mercury." My parents bought me a collection of her stories (called "My Madness") about ten years ago, apparently because it looked like something I'd enjoy. But I didn't read the book until last summer. It's taken a lot of effort to track down her novels. Kavan basically wrote the same story over and over again, and I don't mean that in a subtle way. Her books make me uncomfortable, partly because I can see so much of ME in her characters, but mainly because they're so personal. While you're waiting for the rain to come and the trees lean ominously in the intermittent wind, Anna Kavan is certainly the author to read.
Anna Kavan and libraries I love the way with libraries you go in there, drift around and often seem to arrive, as if with a sense of predestination, before a book. This book, once you pick it up - there’s something almost magnetic happening here - now opens at a particular page. It is all random - or else it is the magic which accrues to the long time searcher and reader. Only last month there was a shooting incident in which a man randomly shot a policeman in the back, killing him, then killing another human who went to his aid. I was away during the shooting. Where this is leading is that, of course, now I live in Napier the magic is more difficult to see. (Sometimes I think the book I am researching on William Colenso, the early missionary and intellectual who lived in Napier, is really a thinly disguised attempt to locate and pin down this tune, this fragment of music - put in all the hidden notes which aren’t at present heard.) Anna Kavan was a reinvention of a person. I love libraries.
Asylum Piece - Anna Kavan Anna Kavan – a character’s name from one of her earlier works, adopted by the author who went on to produce some astonishing work that is all too sadly neglected these days, despite the unflagging championship by her publisher. This was the first of her ‘new’ work, a series of interlinked vignettes that explore her recent experiences of breakdown and confinement in an asylum. On the surface this does not sound like it makes for a cheerful work. And on the surface, it doesn’t. But this is not a dark work either. It is honest, at times chilling, often surreal, and offers the reader a glimpse into a troubled mind. This is down to the style. In some regards, the analysis of her own problems is extremely clinical. And the overall effect is intensely human and vibrant, all too aware of the prisons we make for ourselves as well as those made by others – physical, intellectual, emotional, metaphorical, and symbolic.
Anna Kavan's eternal journey.... It may seem like I am obsessed with a strange missionary who got thrown out of the church after he fathered a child by his Maori servant. I’ve visited various places up North where William Colenso lived in an attempt to put myself into his head. But recently I travelled in another direction time-wise. Over spring some of the large country houses in Hawke’s Bay throw their gardens open to the public. Noblesse oblige and all that. But every old mansion I approach I think of literature - and Anna Kavan in particular. One of the most brilliant passages in Jennifer Sturm’s ‘Anna Kavan’s New Zealand’ concerns a visit to Hawke’s Bay. Regardless, she finally gets on board on old tub. She knows Napier a little from her friend, Ian Hamilton. Here the unreality of the scene, its Englishness, placidity and underlying madness, strike her. But it’s when she leaves she finds herself without transport. This story struck me as especially powerful. I know it’s not real - it’s uber real.