christinehager

Anna Kavan's primary characteristics are her cold seemingly-objective voice, her fevered surrealist description of situations nonetheless imbued with real pathos, her use of landscape as psychology. She's become a definite favorite, to the point where I've been trying to hunt down all of her (largely out-of-print) work for some time now. This was one that I wasn't sure I'd find without shelling out $60 or more on the rare book market. Instead it's turned up no further than the Brooklyn Public Library, available by request from the ambiguously located "Central Storage". I envision a vast subterranean vault, cramped shadowed stacks precarious and overflowing, accessible only through some hidden back stairwell or rickety dumbwaiter of an elevator. Anyway, it has coughed up this marvelous book, and far more importantly, it's confirmed that hunting out the lost Kavan works (and this is the most lost of any I've found yet) is indeed totally worthwhile. Originally published in 1958 (and that may well be the edition I have here), this falls in the middle of the surrealist second act of Kavan's career. The stories vary pretty widely in tone and content, but they're pretty unmistakeably of a set with the stories in Asylum Piece and Julie and the Bazooka. Highlights asterisked: *"A Bright Green Field": a hallucinatory account of a certain unearthly, verdant plot of land that the narrator finds inescapable wherever she goes, and fears may overrun the earth. *"Annunciation": the stifling forces of misguided propriety on a confused young girl, prisoner-like in her home, at the threshold of adulthood. *"Happy Name": the past consulted for current insight, as dream-walk through the labyrinthine house of memory. "One of the Hot Spots": brief and enigmatic, with some memorable landscape. "Ice Storm": long before the glacial phantasmagoria of her masterpiece, mundane Connecticut ice as indecision and interlude. *"Mouse, Shoes": a child's vision out of a dystopian orphanage at the point of departure, but too deftly ambiguous to be sure that the dystopia does not extend beyond the facility walls. One of my favorites here. "The End of Something": a dying seal and interpersonal deterioration. *"The Birds Dancing": one of the best Anna Kavan stories I've encountered, mythic and weird, and almost like a subtler Thomas Ligotti story (I've been alternating between the two for the last few days). Trapped in an ill-chosen vacation destination that resembles the ugly suburb-sprawl of Hannington (in Kavan's first novel, A Perfect Circle) our nameless protagonist seeks some outlet to the countryside. But unlike in the novel, no transit options exist, and she is drawn, instead, towards a mysterious sunken landmark at the town center. Imbued in eerie mystery with suggestions of conspiracy and doom, and then, suddenly, a surge of brutal beauty. And actually pretty unique, for Kavan, in its sudden burst of activity. "Christmas Wishes": isolated and dreamlike and so rather ironically titled, like an account of the holidays from a lost bit of Sleep Has His House. "A Visit to the Sleepmaster": when modern consumerist/societal manipulation has taken over even our most basic rights. "Lonely Unholy Shore": vivid Pacific island travelogue supplanted by less interesting expat dialogue. "All Saints": poetic stream-of-concious diary-ing, perhaps? Apparently Kavan destroyed most of her diaries before death, except for one stretch of some months, which she doctored somewhat, apparently, and set aside. Have these been published somewhere yet? Will they ever? Please? *"New and Splendid": the longest story by far, a kind of high-anxiety conflation of the first chapter of Kafka's Amerika with Metropolis and her own Asylum Piece, as a kind of dystopian/utopian sci-fi with dazzling cityscape description.

2023-07-04 11:42