What do you think?
Rate this book
Cave & Julia
Short story: Kindle Single
When the English journalist named Cave visits the island of Autotelia, he finds the dockyards of the old harbor gentrified and the island’s famous ruins a tourist attraction. When he gets to know the alluring Julia Vicente, a former film actress, he discovers her life has been marked by the childhood disappearance of her brother. Was she guilty of his death, or was it an accident after all? As Cave’s life grows entwined with hers, he tries to answer these questions, while his new lover seems determined to perpetuate the mystery.
When the English journalist named Cave visits the island of Autotelia, he finds the dockyards of the old harbor gentrified and the island’s famous ruins a tourist attraction. When he gets to know the alluring Julia Vicente, a former film actress, he discovers her life has been marked by the childhood disappearance of her brother. Was she guilty of his death, or was it an accident after all? As Cave’s life grows entwined with hers, he tries to answer these questions, while his new lover seems determined to perpetuate the mystery.
15 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 2, 2013
6 people are currently reading
50 people want to read
About the author
M. John Harrison
109 books838 followersaka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 8, 2021
After coming to the horrifying realization that I’d never read anything by this sci-fi great before, this short story seemed like the perfect place to start. Cave & Julia is a mysterious and intriguing tale that sucks you in with its evocative prose, but ultimately leaves you guessing as to its true meaning. Despite it's rather ambiguous nature, I really quite enjoyed it. The narration is excellent too.
April 6, 2014
In Autotelia, a setting that reminded me, perhaps, of an alternate Turkey, a journalist forms an odd relationship with a fading celebrity who was suspected of killing her young brother, when she was a girl. I wanted just a tiny bit more conclusiveness to this piece, but the writing is just fantastic - conjuring a perfect mix of grounded reality and dreamlike occurrences. I believe that this is the first story I've read by Harrison, and clearly, I've been missing something. (I've just ordered two of his books...)
August 11, 2021
Listened to this story while making breakfast. A strange landscape, a deep and hidden history, an ambiguous relationship, a sense of dislocation in place and time and an vague but compelling sense of obsession certainly helped the porridge boil in a way that left me unsettled and in search of elusive meaning.
September 10, 2014
A book that is small in page numbers, but larger by far in content, Cave & Julia is set in Autotelia and London. I’ve not come across the author’s work before and was intrigued enough by the story to do some research. Autotelia is the name given to an imaginary place in which other stories are set. The word itself struck me as real rather than imagined, so I looked further. I found a Portuguese dictionary that told me it means: the doctrine that a work of art, especially a work of literature, is an end in itself or provides its own justification. I found no other entries in English dictionaries.
Enough. The story, if that’s what it can be called, is about relationships and, possibly, dreams. But, oddly, that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a work that recalled to mind D.H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser in tone. It’s a piece of narrative without the usual hooks on which to hang a story. We are introduced to the narrative character, Cave, a journalist, and to Julia, much married and partially destroyed by an unclear event in her childhood. Some attempt is made by Cave to investigate the event, but it is left a question, with insufficient detail to determine what really happened.
The language is fine and always appropriate. An air of mystery and uncertainty pervades the whole tale. Nothing is as it seems, or, perhaps it is. This is a piece of writing that leaves the reader full of questions; impressed but uncertain why that should be.
It’s one of the Amazon Kindle Singles, and is tagged as a fantasy short. At 15 pages it is short, and, existing, as it does, in a space difficult to identify or even in some senses understand, it is fantasy, but fantasy of a literary sort.
I found myself intrigued, curious, disturbed and entertained. But be aware, this is not a story for those looking for a beginning, middle and end, with a denouement or indeed any formal structure. This is more an evocation, an illustration, an account. I enjoyed it, as, I suspect, will those who like things that are not spelled out for them.
Enough. The story, if that’s what it can be called, is about relationships and, possibly, dreams. But, oddly, that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a work that recalled to mind D.H. Lawrence’s The Trespasser in tone. It’s a piece of narrative without the usual hooks on which to hang a story. We are introduced to the narrative character, Cave, a journalist, and to Julia, much married and partially destroyed by an unclear event in her childhood. Some attempt is made by Cave to investigate the event, but it is left a question, with insufficient detail to determine what really happened.
The language is fine and always appropriate. An air of mystery and uncertainty pervades the whole tale. Nothing is as it seems, or, perhaps it is. This is a piece of writing that leaves the reader full of questions; impressed but uncertain why that should be.
It’s one of the Amazon Kindle Singles, and is tagged as a fantasy short. At 15 pages it is short, and, existing, as it does, in a space difficult to identify or even in some senses understand, it is fantasy, but fantasy of a literary sort.
I found myself intrigued, curious, disturbed and entertained. But be aware, this is not a story for those looking for a beginning, middle and end, with a denouement or indeed any formal structure. This is more an evocation, an illustration, an account. I enjoyed it, as, I suspect, will those who like things that are not spelled out for them.
November 24, 2013
Beautiful short story that has more depth than many novels.
August 2, 2023
I really liked this. It was a quick listen on the way to work because it was free on Audible (it was going to expire)
Speaking with @ed.nier on Instagram often has the works of M. John Harrison popping up, so I had no excuses really. Although I think the real aim is to get me to read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It is on my list, I will get to it...
The reminder to engage with more of Harrison’s work is definitely a sound one though. Because his work this time around really reminded me a lot of Ballard.
There’s this assailing heady precision at work. Every sentence is measured and skillfully deployed. Deceptively clean and innocuous... and then the overall narrative, that first seemed simple, unfolds and you have this sudden awareness of the dreaminess of it all.
It just... worked... you’re left wanting more not because you want a conclusion - but because the way it is told makes you just want to exist in that world for longer. Storytelling at its finest!
Speaking with @ed.nier on Instagram often has the works of M. John Harrison popping up, so I had no excuses really. Although I think the real aim is to get me to read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It is on my list, I will get to it...
The reminder to engage with more of Harrison’s work is definitely a sound one though. Because his work this time around really reminded me a lot of Ballard.
There’s this assailing heady precision at work. Every sentence is measured and skillfully deployed. Deceptively clean and innocuous... and then the overall narrative, that first seemed simple, unfolds and you have this sudden awareness of the dreaminess of it all.
It just... worked... you’re left wanting more not because you want a conclusion - but because the way it is told makes you just want to exist in that world for longer. Storytelling at its finest!
December 5, 2024
A-/A
This is a short story that’s kinda too short to really have all that much of an impact… that being said, it’s basically flawless, so 5 stars.
The story reads (to me) like a mashup of JG Ballard and Roberto Bolaño, ie a more literary take on the types of characters that Ballard focused on in his latter years. Specifically it reminded me of Bolaño’s The Third Reich and Cocaine Nights by Ballard with a prodigious sprinkling of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again mixed in.
This is a short story that’s kinda too short to really have all that much of an impact… that being said, it’s basically flawless, so 5 stars.
The story reads (to me) like a mashup of JG Ballard and Roberto Bolaño, ie a more literary take on the types of characters that Ballard focused on in his latter years. Specifically it reminded me of Bolaño’s The Third Reich and Cocaine Nights by Ballard with a prodigious sprinkling of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again mixed in.
May 15, 2023
A beautifully written and enigmatic story which works well as a standalone though it picks up resonances and echoes from other stories in 'You Should Come With Me Now'. There's lots of haunting detail, but I felt the plot - if there is one - was rather too redolent of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'. What's more mysterious, a disappearance or an inability to disappear?
August 2, 2023
i have to admit i mainly got stuck on the narrative of the bored woman who tempts a foreign man to spice up her mediocre life, like a cat playing with a mouse. i felt it was scattered, with no focused message. it did not fit my personal taste.
November 2, 2015
Kindle highlights:
He waited for her early next morning at the tourist beach, a deserted, artificial curve of white sand. The day was already sullen and humid, with hidden light penetrating the cloud and heat resonating from the limestone buttresses above the town. Faint residual smells clung in the corners of the sea wall: the previous day’s fish, salt, perfume, fried food. For a moment it seemed to Cave like a language, but when he listened it had nothing to say.
‘This was a culture of engines,’ Julia Vicente said. ‘Some architectural, some sacrificial, some both.’
Cave sat on the sand, and around him everything was suspended in light; everything like a film, wrapped in cameraman sublime, documentary sublime. Light, silhouettes, warmth like a perfect saturated colour, all at once. Distant objects seemed too large. In the end, he told himself for the hundredth time in his life, you are the only description of what there is. All that counts is to be there.
The shutters banged in the wind under an eggshell sky.
Back in London he barely thought of her, yet soon found himself outbound again on a 787 Dreamliner from Heathrow. ‘Before you ask,’ he told her when she found him on her doorstep five hours later, ‘I have no memory of buying the ticket, let alone making the decision.’ He’d brought the clothes he stood up in, he said; a credit card and his passport. She laughed. 'I've got someone here,' she said. 'But I can get rid of him tomorrow.' 'I don't mind,' Cave said. She shut the door. 'Yes you do,' she called from inside. After that, he made the crossing two or three times a year; visits between which the rest of his life suspended itself like a bridge.
a condition of anxiety which founded not just his memories of Autotelia but of himself.
He waited for her early next morning at the tourist beach, a deserted, artificial curve of white sand. The day was already sullen and humid, with hidden light penetrating the cloud and heat resonating from the limestone buttresses above the town. Faint residual smells clung in the corners of the sea wall: the previous day’s fish, salt, perfume, fried food. For a moment it seemed to Cave like a language, but when he listened it had nothing to say.
‘This was a culture of engines,’ Julia Vicente said. ‘Some architectural, some sacrificial, some both.’
Cave sat on the sand, and around him everything was suspended in light; everything like a film, wrapped in cameraman sublime, documentary sublime. Light, silhouettes, warmth like a perfect saturated colour, all at once. Distant objects seemed too large. In the end, he told himself for the hundredth time in his life, you are the only description of what there is. All that counts is to be there.
The shutters banged in the wind under an eggshell sky.
Back in London he barely thought of her, yet soon found himself outbound again on a 787 Dreamliner from Heathrow. ‘Before you ask,’ he told her when she found him on her doorstep five hours later, ‘I have no memory of buying the ticket, let alone making the decision.’ He’d brought the clothes he stood up in, he said; a credit card and his passport. She laughed. 'I've got someone here,' she said. 'But I can get rid of him tomorrow.' 'I don't mind,' Cave said. She shut the door. 'Yes you do,' she called from inside. After that, he made the crossing two or three times a year; visits between which the rest of his life suspended itself like a bridge.
a condition of anxiety which founded not just his memories of Autotelia but of himself.
Read
July 19, 2014A haunting little curio; think the aftermath of Machen's 'The White People' 20 years on, but relocated to an indistinct yet pin-sharp area on the Mediterranean. As dense with idea bombs and finely-tuned tricks of language as anything he's written, but snuck out as a Kindle single, possibly because the mere existence of such a distribution channel is somehow profoundly Harrison in its mixture of technological wonder and frustrating shabbiness.
June 1, 2015
No resolution
This didn't end so much as it just stopped. The writing style and rhythm were outstanding but if there was a point to the story, I completely missed it.
This didn't end so much as it just stopped. The writing style and rhythm were outstanding but if there was a point to the story, I completely missed it.
November 4, 2015
I didn't get/like this one.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews