Ann Quin

The much-anticipated republication of Ann Quin's masterpiece of post-war British fiction: caustic, thrilling, unforgettable.

Berg

Three opens with the death of a young woman, identified only as S, possibly a suicide. Following her death, Ruth and Leonard -- a middle-aged British couple whose marriage has devolved into pithy and bitter conversations -- review the time S spent at their summer house. In a lyrical prose style likened to that of such diverse writers as Virginia Woolf and William Burroughs, Ann Quin presents the enigmatic intricacies of the relationship between these three people by blending the conversations and flashbacks of Ruth and Leonard with the diary, audiotapes and movies S left behind. A combination of laconic dialogue and poetic impressions, Three is an incisive exploration of the emotional and sexual undercurrents of British middle-class life.

Three

Two characters - a woman in search of her brother, and the woman's lover in search of himself - travel the Mediterranean landscape, co-dependently bound to one another in a hopeless relationship. Mirroring the schizophrenic nature of the characters, the text is broken up into alternating sections of narrative and diary entries. The lyrical nature of the prose counters this fragmentation, as resonances develop amid "cut-up" dreams and fantasies in a fashion similar to a musical composition.

Passages

Ann Quin's Tripticks offers an episodic account of the narrator's flight across a surreal American landscape, pursued by his "No. 1 X-wife" and her new lover. This masterpiece of pre-punk aesthetics critiques the hypocrisy and consumerism of modern culture while spoofing the 'typical' maladjusted family, which in this case includes a father who made his money in ballpoint pens and a mother whose life revolves around her overpampered, all-demanding poodle.

Tripticks

The lost stories of a remarkable writer who distinctively embodies the radical spirit of the 1960s

The Unmapped Country

Eine Frau ist auf der Suche nach ihrem verschollenen Bruder, der vielleicht gefoltert, eingesperrt oder gar getötet wurde. Sie ist in Begleitung ihres Liebhabers, der zugleich ihr männliches Spiegelbild ist. Stets auf der Suche nach sich selbst, immer in Bewegung, führen sie ihre ganz verschiedenen und doch ineinander verflochtenen Existenzen, stürzen sich auf nutzlose Hoffnungen, zögern aufzugeben, fürchten sich vor dem Ende. Ann Quins erfindungsreiche Verwendung von Wörtern besitzt eine fast musikalische Qualität, die in Verbindung mit der außergewöhnlichen Intensität ihres Erzählstils einen Roman hervorgebracht hat, der so bestechend wie schön ist. Zwischen erzählenden Teilen und Tagebuch wechselnd ist Quins dritter Roman zugleich erotisch und doch furchteinflößend, ja gilt gar als ihr betörendstes, poetischstes und geheimnisvollstes Werk. Ihre literarische Freiheit bahnte einen Weg, dem Autor:innen wie Eimear McBride, Chris Kraus und Anna Burns noch heute folgen.

Passagen

Ann Quin's wildest, funniest, freakiest, kinkiest, and best novel--a road-trip novel, a graphic novel, a spy novel, a Beat novel, an anti-novel--is available again, to inspire a new generation of mavericks.

"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father...." So begins Ann Quin's first novel, which has been compared to the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Nathalie Sarraute. Against the backdrop of this gritty seaside town, an absurd and brutal plot develops involving three characters--Alistair Berg, his father, and their mutual mistress. In his attempt to kill his father, Berg mutilates a ventriloquist's dummy, almost falls victim to his father's mistaken sexual advances, and is relentlessly taunted by a group of tramps. Disturbing and at times startlingly comic, "Berg" chronicles the interrelations among these three characters as they circle one another in an escalating spiral of violence. A member of a group of British avant-garde writers that included B. S. Johnson and Eva Figes, Ann Quin is one of the best kept secrets of British contemporary experimental writing. She published four novels before her death at the age of 37.

Ann Quin

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