Anna Kavan

In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man known as the warden search for an elusive girl in a frozen, seemingly post-nuclear, apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair. Acclaimed upon its 1967 publication as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right.

A daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation, Sleep Has His House charts chronologically the stages of the subject's gradual withdrawal from all interest in and contact with the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence and youth are described in what Kavan terms 'night-time language' - a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations. The novel suggests we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams but that these thoughts can only be sharpened or decoded by contemplation in the dark. Anna Kavan maintained that the plot of a book is only the point of departure, beyond which she tries to reveal that side of life which is never seen by the waking eye but which dreams and drugs can suddenly illuminate. She spent the last ten years of her life literally and metaphorically shutting out the light; the startling discovery of Sleep Has His House is how much these night-time illuminations reveal her joy for the living world.

Sleep Has His House

Described by Brian Aldiss as "De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister," junkie, depressive, radical, enigma, cult figure, genre-bending experimental writer and artist--few women writers have gathered the same air of mystique, so often the preserve of male counter-culture figures, as Helen Woods, more commonly known by her adopted pen name and persona: Anna Kavan. This anthology of Anna Kavan's short fiction and journalism marks the 50 years since her death in 1968, offering an accessible introduction to readers new to her work and a timely survey of her diverse literary talents for her fans. From moving portraits of clinical depression to phantasmagoric visions of science-fiction wonder, the selection is taken from across Kavan's oeuvre, representing the best of her writing and showing the range of her style. Readers will encounter oblique and elegiac tales of breakdown and incarceration from Asylum Piece (1940), moving evocations of wartime from I Am Lazarus (1945), fantastic and surrealist pieces from A Bright Green Field (1958) and stories of heroin addiction from Julia and the Bazooka (1970). Her science-fiction stories will appeal to fans of her final novel Ice, while the previously unpublished 'Starting a Career' is a futuristic spy-thriller. Writing for the magazine Horizon between 1943 and 1946, Kavan revealed her personal and political views. She was pacifist, nihilist, atheist and vehemently anti-fascist; she implicitly believed in people's mutual responsibility for one another and was preoccupied with those who were dispossessed, marginalized or alone. Her book reviews reveal something of her literary tastes and influences as well as being a platform for her beliefs regarding psychology, ethics and the importance of art and literature in turbulent times. Machines in the Head shows the extraordinary range of Kavan's work, which is, by turns, moving, funny, bizarre, poignant, often unsettling but always distinctive and unique.

Selected Short Writing

Machines in the Head

This collection of stories, mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical, chart the descent of the narrator from the onset of neurosis to final incarceration in a Swiss clinic. The sense of paranoia, of persecution by a foe or force that is never given a name, evokes The Trial by Kafka, a writer with whom Kavan is often compared, although her deeply personal, restrained, and almost foreign —accented style has no true model. The same characters who recur throughout—the protagonist's unhelpful "adviser," the friend and lover who abandons her at the clinic, and an assortment of deluded companions—are sketched without a trace of the rage, self-pity, or sentiment that have marked more recent accounts of mental instability.

Asylum Piece and Other Stories

Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

Terwijl de wereld door ijsschotsen dreigt te worden bedolven, probeert een man wanhopig een meisje te bereiken dat bij hem vreemde gevoelens opwekt.

A Novel

A Scarcity of Love

Short stories

I am Lazarus

Não é à toa que Jonathan Lethem afirma no prefácio desta edição que Gelo "é uma narrativa como a lua é a lua. Só existe uma." Experimental, onírico e inebriante, o romance de Anna Kavan teve um percurso particular desde sua primeira publicação, em 1967. Se por um lado Kavan foi consagrada pela crítica — que a filiou a escritores canônicos como Kafka, Woolf ou Beckett — e despertou a admiração de autoras como Anaïs Nim e Doris Lessing, por outro lado, a ficcionista inglesa que adotava como pseudônimo o nome de uma de suas personagens foi menos lida do que merecia, de certo em razão de suas rupturas narrativas desconcertantes. Em meio a uma iminente catástrofe ambiental que destruirá o planeta com uma avalanche de gelo, três protagonistas inominados e envolvidos em um suposto triângulo amoroso tentam se salvar a um só tempo da destruição que se aproxima e uns dos outros. O narrador, "a garota" e o "guardião" estão sempre a um passo da aniquilação, da guerra dos homens diante da escassez de recursos, da violência de seu próprio relacionamento e das imensas paredes gélidas que engolfam seus caminhos em ambiente e tempo não definidos. Sempre no encalço da garota cristalina de cabelos brancos de tão loiros, os dois homens não poupam brutalidade para protegê-la, tratando-a como vítima incapaz e indefesa. Tudo em Gelo parece ruir e escapar inclusive da leitura mais atenta, como se a brancura gélida cegasse a percepção. Mas, como é comum acontecer com obras de vanguarda, o tempo vem realçando o caráter antecipatório do livro ao evidenciar mais de um aspecto central da narrativa: ao lado do protofeminismo do romance, subjaz nele a certeza de que ação destrutiva do homem sobre a natureza invariavelmente o levará à extinção. Embora temas pós-apocalípticos já fossem comuns na literatura do período pós Segunda Guerra Mundial, sobretudo pela falta de saída em que se encontravam os indivíduos fraturados, é inevitável ler Gelo nos dias de hoje sem associá-lo ao panorama das mudanças climáticas, tema do posfácio desta edição, assinado pela pesquisadora inglesa Victoria Walker. Não apenas pela escolha temática, mas por sua linguagem e forma, o romance pode ser lido como uma poderosa representação literária do antropoceno e do apocalipse ecológico prenunciado pela genialidade fugidia de Kavan.

Gelo

Selahattin Özpalabıyıklar

Julia ve Bazuka

Kartal Yuvasi

"In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive "glass-girl" with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, a Kafkaesque literary dreamscape, and a brilliant allegory for its author's struggles with addiction--all crystallized in prose as glittering as the piling snow. Acclaimed upon its publication as one of the best science fiction books of the year, Kavan's 1967 novel has built a reputation as an extraordinary and innovative work of literature, garnering acclaim from China Mieville, Patti Smith, J.G. Ballard, AnaiÌ8s Nin, and Doris Lessing, among others. With echoes of dystopian classics like Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and J.G. Ballard's High Rise, Ice is a necessary and unforgettable addition to the canon of science fiction classics."--

The Parson was not published in Anna Kavan’s lifetime, but found after her death in manuscript form. Thought to have been written between the mid 50s and early 60s, it presages, through its undertones and imagery, some of Kavan’s last and most enduring fiction (such as Ice). It was published finally, to wide acclaim, by Peter Owen in 1995. The Parson of the title is not a cleric, but an upright young army officer so nick-named for his apparent prudishness. On leave in his native homeland, he meets a rich and beguiling beauty, the woman of his dreams. The days that the Parson spends with Rejane, riding in and exploring the wild moorland have their own enchantment. But Rejane grows restless in this desolate l∧ doubtless in love with the Parson, she discourages any intimacy. Until that is, she persuades him to take her to a sinister castle situated on a treacherous headland. This is less a tale of unrequited love than exploration of divided selves, momentarily locked in an unequal embrace. Passion is revealed as a play of the senses as well as a destructive force. There have been valid comparisons to Poe, Kafka, and Thomas Hardy, but the presence of her trademark themes, cleverly juxtaposed and set in her risk-taking prose, mark The Parson as 100% Kavan.

The Parson

Hielo

Anna Kavan is now regarded as one of the most original writers of the twentieth century. An early novel, A Charmed Circle foreshadows her later development. It is the story of a family marooned in a country house near an ugly, expanding manufacturing town of the 1920s. The atmosphere of the house is heavy with repression, hostility and revolt, and is darkened by the sinister influence of the father, whose warped nature dominates the lives of his wife, daughters and son. The struggles of the young people to escape from this malign environment, their desperate search for self-expression and freedom, and their apparent successes point only to the inevitable triumph of temperament and upbringing, and leave them enclosed in the charmed circle of their limitations. With a masterly touch, Kavan contrasts the English countryside with the brittle London life of the era.

A Charmed Circle

»Liknar ingenting annat. Isen i den här boken är inte psykologisk eller metafysisk; ensamheten har här förtrollats till en fysisk verklighet lika hallucinatorisk som i Coleridges Ancient Mariner.« | Doris Lessing< »Anna Kavans berättelser är genomsyrade av en sällsynt sorts hotande fara.« | New York Times Is utspelar sig i den nukleära vintern efter ett kärnvapenkrig, då en ny istid råder på jorden. Vi följer bokens berättare på jakt efter ett skört väsen, en flicka med albinohår. Sökandet blir alltmer hallucinatoriskt, vi vet inte var vi är – eller ens vad vi känner. Färden går genom ett land ockuperat av en främmande militär makt. Men det största hotet är naturen själv, vars väggar av is breder ut sig över världen. Språket i Anna Kavans Is är som en dröm, återgiven under pressen av en verklig katastrof. En modern brittisk klassiker av en författare vars rykte i världslitteraturen bara vuxit med åren. I översättning av Disa Törngren och med ett nyskrivet förord av Helena Fagertun. ANNA KAVAN [1901–1968] var en brittisk författare och konstnär. Hon föddes som Helen Emily Woods, publicerades först under sitt namn som gift, Helen Ferguson, men antog från och med 1939 namnet Anna Kavan. Många av hennes verk gavs ut postumt och hon har hyllats av författare som Doris Lessing, Anaïs Nin, Jean Rhys och J. G. Ballard. »En av de mest skrämmande bilderna av världens slut… Man kan bara beundra styrkan och modet i den här visionen.« | The Times »Anna Kavan är en av de mest mystiska moderna författarna, och hon skapade en unikt fängslande fiktionsvärld. Få samtida romanförfattare kan matcha intensiteten i hennes vision.« | J. G. Ballard »Att kalla den kafkaesk eller science fiction vore att förminska Is, som är en verklig klassiker.« | New Statesman »En vision av obönhörlig intensitet som kombinerar anmärkningsvärt fantasifullt skrivande med vad som blir till en kärlekssång till världens undergång. Inte ett ord förspills, inte en bild är malplacerad.« | Times Literary Supplement

A Bright Green Field and Other Stories

Eagles' Nest

The papers of Anna Kavan (1904-1968), British writer and painter, document in considerable detail her long career. Included in the collection are the autograph and typescript manuscripts for several unpublished novels as well as those for her 18 published novels, novellas and numerous short stories. Also included are diaries, notebooks, photographs, personal memorabilia and correspondence which includes 847 letters and notes to Raymond B. Marriott, 74 letters to George Bullock and 258 letters, notes and drawings from K. T. Bluth to Kavan. There are also an additional 28 autograph letters from Kavan to Rhys Davies, dated 1944 to 1954. Kavan's artwork, predominantly watercolor but including oil, pen and ink, and goache provide considerable insight into her work and her life. As a whole, this collection represents nearly all of the extant material relating to Anna Kavan.

Anna Kavan

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