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Anna Kavan's eternal journey....
blogPost, 19/11/2009One of the most brilliant passages in Jennifer Sturm’s ‘Anna Kavan’s New Zealand’ concerns a visit to Hawke’s Bay. It is war time and the Kavanesque narrator - a woman not unidentitical to the author Kavan - is making her way out of New Zealand - one of the few places, ironically, she felt at peace. But she’s bursting to get away. Kavan was also a heroin addict, so probably New Zealand in 1942 wasn’t much chop.
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sombre indifference and a talking book
blogPost, 03/07/2009I live in a geographically isolated place, Napier. It takes five hours driving to reach Auckland, the city in which I grew up. When I was a kid we used to come down and visit my grandmother in Napier. There was one part of the road which was notorious. This was the Napier-Taupo road. It starts off being very flat then you enter a series of corrugations where the hills become increasingly moutainous, until you lose cellphone contact and there are no houses. It is very beautiful. Strangely beautiful.
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Anna Kavan "I am Lazarus" - Spoiler!
blogPost, 06/01/2011The 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 brother was kind and always tried to bring a smile to the narrators face, though he was never rewarded with one.
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I love this photo of AK, The sleepwalker in the city...
blogPost, 16/06/2009Anna Kavan returned to war time Britain and spent the rest of her troubled life there. She continued to publish books. I remember seeing a book by her in the 1970s and thinking she was Eastern European. She's that strain of English writing which is Eurocentric, 'surrealiste' is the term she used. I have now finished the book and it's lodged in my mind as something rare and wonderful - the sound of a voice.
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Sleep Does Not Have His House: Anna Kavan
blogPost, 20/01/2007A very rare bout of insomnia seems like the perfect time to discuss dreams. Well, I did sleep for a few hours and woke up after a particularly vivid dream. Which I will not describe.
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Mercury by Anna Kavan
blogPost, 06/07/2012I thought from what was said about Anna Kavan's Mercury that it would be litfic uncomfortably fitted into the fantasy genre. This was largely confirmed when I saw that Doris Lessing had written the foreword, and what she had said about the book. Litfic and I seem to have an uneasy relationship. I generally don't like it, I'm getting the feeling I must be some sort of literary philistine.
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Anna Kavan : Neige
blogPost, 15/01/2013Ces derniers temps, j'ai eu la chance de ne lire que des bons livres mais, je dois bien avouer, rien d'aussi singulier et sublime que ce roman cauchemardesque aux réminiscences "ballardiennes" (le Ballard première période). J'ai découvert cette Anna Kavan, en perpétuelle dépression et morte le nez dans la neige (trop facile, pardonnez-moi !), chez Discipline in Disorder, where else ?
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Anna Kavan, Asylum piece, 1940
blogPost, 16/09/2009A l’origine, la photo d’une femme au visage serein, souriant… Derrière laquelle se cache un monde asilaire, une femme glaciaire, lointaine, un écrivain hors du commun.
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Anna Kavan (1901-1968)
blogPost, 04/09/2007Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in Cannes, France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriot British parents. Anna spent her childhood in several European countries, California and England. She completed her education in England. She married (Donald Ferguson) and for a time lived in Burma.
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Rooms with Books: A Charmed Circle – by Anna Kavan
blogPost, 18/09/2007I love finding new/old authors. So what do I mean by that? Well, authors that wrote many years ago, but who I’ve never heard off. Many of these have become favourites, such as Barbara Pym. Anna Kavan will be the same I have a feeling, though from what I understand some of her later books are a lot different then her first few.
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Neige, de Anna Kavan
blogPost, 11/10/2013Bon, donc, séance de rattrapage, sur qui sur quoi ? Là, en commençant mon article, je ne savais même pas, et puis finalement j’ai décidé de parler de Neige, de Anna Kavan, paru aux éditions Cambourakis il y a peu.
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Anna Kavan and libraries
blogPost, 14/06/2009I 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. This happened to me yesterday. I was browsing in the Auckland Public Library heritage room. I saw a book called Anna Kavan’s New Zealand. I picked it up, the book fell open and immediately I spied the word Napier.
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A Stranger Still by AK (Helen Ferguson)
blogPost, 08/07/2008This book was much easier to read then Let Me Alone. The Kavan character isn’t central to the plot.
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Anna Kavan's New Zealand
blogPost, 30/09/2009Come along and hear Jennifer Sturm, author of Anna Kavan’s New Zealand, talk about Anna Kavan, an experimental writer and talented artist, who struggled with bouts of depression and insecurity, as well as heroin addiction and a stream of unconventional love affairs.
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Asylum Piece - Anna Kavan
blogPost, 18/04/2011Anna 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.
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The Dark Sisters by Helen Ferguson (Anna Kavan)
blogPost, 15/01/2008I was so very, very lucky to be able to get this book. I had to Interlibrary Loan it from Dublin. The book is a bit rare because it was only printed once. The book is in great condition though, puts modern printing to shame! I was really interested to see what Kavan, since that is the name she changed to later I’ll use it here, wrote next after reading The Charmed Circle.
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Books read in August
blogPost, 02/09/2012Sleep Has His House – Anna Kavan Unique. In my experience. I can think of no other novel that I have read that comes anywhere near this. Based in part on her own life and withdrawal from the world, it is a truly surreal journey from day into night, from reality into dreams, from normality into a world of symbolism that is cut off from the mainstream. Yet it manages at the same to imply that, in fact, the night and the dreams and the symbols are a much more fundamental reality underlying the chaotic world in which we are expected to live.
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Doom & Gloom From Anna Kavan
blogPost, 19/08/2006In an effort to depress myself, I'm reading another one of Anna Kavan's early books: "Change the Name" from 1941, written before she really DID change her name from "Helen Ferguson" to "Anna Kavan." (Anna's sad childhood, depression, heroin addiction, and coping methods are fascinating reading...get her biography if you can).
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An Ode to Fluff
blogPost, 13/10/2011What books are you currently loving? Ooh! Seriously still amazed by Anna Kavan
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Doris Lessing reviews new Anna Kavan bio
blogPost, 17/08/2006A new biography of Anna Kavan, A Stranger on Earth, by that pest Jeremy Reed is reviewed by Doris Lessing here: Independent Online Edition > Reviews. I call Jeremy Reed a pest because he has managed to write either Fiction or Non-Fiction on nearly ever fun subject. Every time I turn around to see what's been written about Rimbaud or Artaud, there's that damn Jeremy Reed. And now he has this biography coming out on my favorite fiction writer, Anna Kavan. Underappreciated she is, but then again you might easily believe that this is the way she would have wanted it. Her work has often been compared to Doris Lessing, so her thoughts on the subject are relevant:
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Extreme appearances: Anxiety Cut-Up (with Anna Kavan)
blogPost, 03/12/2012I'm in residence in Pittsburgh at the Cyber Punk Apocalypse, indulging my whims. Today I attempted a Burroughs-style cut-up with an existential excerpt from my journal and a selection from "Ice," by Anna Kavan, a bleak surrealist novel I'm currently reading. I took the liberty of changing some tenses and inserting punctuation.
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The Mysterious Anna Kavan
blogPost, 08/01/2006’ve been reading Anna Kavan’s Asylum Piece. It’s a stunning collection, each story stranger and more intense than the last.
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bernur: Kliniken och andra berättelser, Anna Kavan
blogPost, 01/02/2015Tack vare de mindre svenska förlagen har det blivit möjligt att täppa till några bildningsluckor, så som med Sphinxs förnämliga serie surrealister, och nu Förlaget Glas, som ger ut en bok av Anna Kavan: Kliniken och andra berättelser, i översättning av Helena Eriksson och Helena Fagertun. Kavans författarskap har gått mig helt förbi, och jag har helt missat att romanen Is översattes till svenska 1977.
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A Charmed Circle, Anna Kavan
blogPost, 01/10/2007Marooned in a country house in an ugly manufacturing town is an old vicarage of which expensive improvements have been undertaken.
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Rhys Davies and Anna Kavan
blogPost, 16/01/2008The relationship between Welsh novelist Rhys Davies and cult author Anna Kavan is a fascinating one. I guess what drew them together must have been their outsider status - Davies the closeted homosexual and Kavan the secret heroin addict.
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Anna Kavan, la ciencia ficcion extrana y alucinada : Hielo
blogPost, 28/10/2008Conocí Hielo, de Anna Kavan, porque soy aficionada a la ciencia ficción y estaba preparando una Bibliografía de escritoras del género. Alguien me recomendó la novela, como uno de esos ejemplos en que una autora no especializada en CF hace una incursión en esa literatura que -tanto respecto a los autores como al público aficionado- tiene mucho de ghetto.
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Ice
blogPost, 27/03/2012I first heard of Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967, but republished in 2006 by Peter Owen) when John Self reviewed it on his blog almost exactly a year ago, and it went right onto my list of books to check out in the future.
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Picador Books – Part 7 – Anna Kavan, Ken Kesey, Maxine Hong Kingston, J K Klavans & Richard Klein
blogPost, 05/04/2010Anna Kavan’s novels were rediscovered in the 1970s and Picador published at least two of them, Ice and Sleep Has His House
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The Strange Case of AK
blogPost, 03/07/2007The 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."
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Anna Kavan - De Quincey's heir, Kafka's sister
blogPost, 07/12/2009Anna Kavan (April 10, 1901—1968; born Helen Emily Woods) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter.
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Burroughs / Writers on Heroin
blogPost, 23/02/2011WSB's D.O.C. was of course heroin. This lead me to thinking of other opiate friendly writers. There are not that many distinguished candidates, alcoholic writers, on the other hand, are ten a penny. There are probably a greater number of alcoholic Nobel prize winning writers. Here is a partial list - Will Self, Roberto Bolano, Anna Kavan, Aleister Crowley, Jim Carroll, Mary Butts**, Elizabeth Strong, Irvine Welsh. Some observers are not sure Bolano was much of a user.
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Anna Kavan / Mon âme en Chine.
blogPost, 30/06/2012"La fille avance à côté de moi, le visage levé, rayonnant. A la voir, on devine qu'elle a perdu son âme, qu'un jour son âme s'est envolé en Chine."
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AK (bis) / Obsessionnel.
blogPost, 04/07/2012Les six pages signées Anna Kavan sortent de nulle part. Aucune trace dans les recueils traduits ou les rares articles consacrés à l'écrivaine anglaise, à peine connue de quelques lecteurs français, les moindres n'étant pas Viviane Forrester, Claire Malroux ou Christine Jordis, talentueuses passeuses.
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Anna Kavan : Asylum Piece (1940)
blogPost, 06/07/2012Anna 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.