Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 06:15:27 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Anna Kavan

Started by Mark Steels Stockbroker, June 10, 2019, 09:16:00 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Mark Steels Stockbroker

A new anthology of her shorter fiction has come out. This also includes book reviews she wrote for Horizon in the 40s. Reading around that world, it's clear all the grand old men were complete cunts.

I suppose she fits the bill as a "cult writer" with a small but devoted fanbase. Current 93 did an album inspired by one of her novels, though I can't hear much connecting in it.

(Spam)

object-lesson

Ashamed to say all I've read by Anna Kavan is Mercury, because it was recommended by a fan of 'outsider' art and literature. Then later I found people were saying it was pretty much a draft version of Ice.

But Mercury is excellent in itself, and as someone who's never really experience an altered state of consciousness but is fascinated by them it's one of the best pieces of writing in that vein I've read. Trouble with a writer like Kavan is that you can become more interested in the biography than the work, because she's such a fascinating figure though she deliberately obscured the facts about herself and her life.

What would be the first fictional recommendations you would suggest?

Mark Steels Stockbroker

Julia & The Bazooka
Ice
Sleep Has His House
A Stranger Still (one of the Helen Ferguson novels, about the character "Anna Kavan")

object-lesson

Quote from: Mark Steels Stockbroker on July 27, 2019, 08:46:34 PM
Julia & The Bazooka
Ice
Sleep Has His House
A Stranger Still (one of the Helen Ferguson novels, about the character "Anna Kavan")

Thank you. I might PM you if I get more absorbed in her world, as may happen.

Norton Canes

Read 'Ice' during the couple of scorching weeks we had last summer. Enjoyed it once I realised that the chapters are really meant to connect - there's no narrative consistency, it's all a bit fever dream.

Mark Steels Stockbroker

#5
(spam)

Norton Canes

Quote from: Norton Canes on August 02, 2019, 12:23:45 PM
Read 'Ice' during the couple of scorching weeks we had last summer. Enjoyed it once I realised that the chapters are really meant to connect - there's no narrative consistency, it's all a bit fever dream

'Aren't'. Aren't mean to connect

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

She was good as Ollie Olive in " On The Buses".