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I Am Lazarus
Short stories addressing the surreal realities of mental illness, from an incredible cult writer often compared to Kafka and Woolf The tortured life of Anna Kavan brought her some reward in terms of great pieces of art. Her drug addiction bore fruit in the Julia and the Bazooka collection of stories; while this companion volume recalls her experience of the asylum—powerful, haunting works which can be harrowing but are full of sympathy too.
240 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1945
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724 people want to read
About the author
Anna Kavan
39 books473 followersAnna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents.
Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. The change in her writing style and physical appearance coincided with a mental breakdown. During this time, Helen also renamed herself Anna Kavan after a character in her own novel Let Me Alone.
Around 1926 Anna became addicted to heroin. Her addiction has been described as an attempt to self-medicate rather than recreational. Kavan made no apologies for her heroin usage. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life.
Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. The change in her writing style and physical appearance coincided with a mental breakdown. During this time, Helen also renamed herself Anna Kavan after a character in her own novel Let Me Alone.
Around 1926 Anna became addicted to heroin. Her addiction has been described as an attempt to self-medicate rather than recreational. Kavan made no apologies for her heroin usage. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
March 29, 2018
The first section of short stories in I am Lazarus relate to mental illness and institutionalized patients. After the second world war, Kavan, who had struggled for many years with her own mental illness, assisted with the returning soldiers in what was then termed "effort syndrome" or "soldier's heart", now referred to as Post-Traumatic Stress. The stories in this section are told from both the patients' and the caretaker's perspective, and they engender the confusion, the melancholy, and the sadness of the situation.
While this was a strong collection overall, five stories stood out to me:
*The Gannets is only a few pages but strong in tone and setting. It predates Hitchcock's The Birds, but achieves that same eerie turn of events.
* The Brothers - things said and unsaid
*The Picture and *All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive pull from an individual confusion and anxiety when those around you don't understand you, often resulting in one questioning their own memories or sanity. Reminiscent of Kafka. These stories are unsettling, but also very readable. The reader is placed right in the middle of the actions with the characters, and even with very little context and background, are able to know and empathize with what is happening.
*Benjo had a sinister and otherworldly quality that I liked
Kavan wrote a number of novels and short stories, and I'll definitely be back. This collection was an early work, and other reviewers have noted the seeds for her later and better-known novels like Ice.
While this was a strong collection overall, five stories stood out to me:
*The Gannets is only a few pages but strong in tone and setting. It predates Hitchcock's The Birds, but achieves that same eerie turn of events.
* The Brothers - things said and unsaid
*The Picture and *All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive pull from an individual confusion and anxiety when those around you don't understand you, often resulting in one questioning their own memories or sanity. Reminiscent of Kafka. These stories are unsettling, but also very readable. The reader is placed right in the middle of the actions with the characters, and even with very little context and background, are able to know and empathize with what is happening.
*Benjo had a sinister and otherworldly quality that I liked
Kavan wrote a number of novels and short stories, and I'll definitely be back. This collection was an early work, and other reviewers have noted the seeds for her later and better-known novels like Ice.
June 27, 2013
He saw the young man’s face in the mirror up on the wall, he saw the thick wind-ruffled hair and the little scar on the cheekbone. The face moved in the mirror and when he looked round he could not see it anywhere in the room, and when he wanted to call out the sickness choked him, and now he tried to fight the icy sickness, but like whales the waves of it fell on him till he was pounded and drowned, and while he froze suffocating and could not move or breathe.
The grass whispered beneath his wonder-tipped fingers, dreaming yet still awake. If you had been in a sleeping pills coma and it felt like you slept a million years and hadn't slept at all. Did the daylight moon swept grasses say that he was lucky? Lazarus risen from real world asylum, lie down in are people lucky to be born.
Did the mute woman's eyes make an appeal? If you heard the animals in the zoo talk to you and you went home, ignoring the pleas bidden in your own heart. The not very good doctor wishes he had never come. I've thought about her for months. It doesn't mean anything because she's not real and I think about people who are real and I don't do anything.
Why did the voice sound sad and not indignant when the world does as it is expected and does not give the right picture, the answer to the question, home in the you're a stranger land.
The voices sound like this. Without words, as if written by you they take on that life. Sleep without rest dreams.
I despise my Anna Kavan reviews. Her worlds own space in head, chest and gut. The outside the window and what is in it, lit up or trapped. I take what I read seriously and if I were a story I wouldn't ask for better than me. I'll think about it and probably have proof on my face and missed breathing. The evidence in my writing always sucks, my innards don't prism reflect etc., and it is always deeply frustrating. I feel a little sick at the prospect of writing another one of these. I feel less fake admitting that, anyway. People look at each other as if they wish them dead. If you had another stomach for every time they made you feel sick. In her stories you know what they mean when they don't want people like this over anyone else. She would write "mercy" and it feels like another meaning of mercy. If you escaped it wasn't that they felt pity for you. You were just living in the hell hole they got charge of. This is her street. I wish that just one time I could even approach what I feel about this without hiding in my crippled descriptions of paranoia and fog and deafness in sky pictures. If you were waiting for the ground to swallow you it would be in overhead and if you were praying or just know it is going to come anyway asteroid it would be in the ground once you've stared at it for too long. If there was something that existed before this asteroid and swallowed throat puncture feeling that would be what I have about Anna Kavan. Her stories run their fingers over that before time whispering and it is that kind of silence. It doesn't matter what you say because it was always that way. That's worse than paranoia to me, or masks without faces or anything. I would forget about being creepy if it was just creepy. I believe in it.
My favorite story is Who Has Desired the Sea. A man waits to see himself. If you lived your life looking in windows and water and everything looked like you could see right through it, but lifeless, no reflection. You wait until the right man comes until you are the right one. The confusion and the outside the window voices of his girlfriend or the people in the hospital. I feel like I'm waiting for the thing that came before it so I recognize it and it gets worse and worse and emptier and emptier glass. The waiting for yourself. I know the timeless voice of this guy in her story who is waiting for that in his glass head with the swinging pendulum. Walk around and feel like you're under water. I know when I feel like that if someone else says it. This is my favorite story because it makes me feel like an underwater sea monster looking in a mirror and you don't know you're the monster. This is what it must look like to someone who doesn't want anyone else there. They want to feel right and you're wrong. It is the other side of the glass. If I read it in her story I feel like I can sense other things at once, the things that I'm not even looking at, the why of the horror. Violets "bloom inviolably" and I know them and what it is about. It's in a mental picture underneath, one where it is past too late in a doomed story. If I try to talk about it is all wrong and I'm writing more talk, talk, talk that doesn't know what it feels like to hear without sound. My reviews are bull shit but I hope an echo of the under water feeling came through. At least if I look into the drowned eyes I can listen with drowned eyes.
The grass whispered beneath his wonder-tipped fingers, dreaming yet still awake. If you had been in a sleeping pills coma and it felt like you slept a million years and hadn't slept at all. Did the daylight moon swept grasses say that he was lucky? Lazarus risen from real world asylum, lie down in are people lucky to be born.
Did the mute woman's eyes make an appeal? If you heard the animals in the zoo talk to you and you went home, ignoring the pleas bidden in your own heart. The not very good doctor wishes he had never come. I've thought about her for months. It doesn't mean anything because she's not real and I think about people who are real and I don't do anything.
Why did the voice sound sad and not indignant when the world does as it is expected and does not give the right picture, the answer to the question, home in the you're a stranger land.
The voices sound like this. Without words, as if written by you they take on that life. Sleep without rest dreams.
I despise my Anna Kavan reviews. Her worlds own space in head, chest and gut. The outside the window and what is in it, lit up or trapped. I take what I read seriously and if I were a story I wouldn't ask for better than me. I'll think about it and probably have proof on my face and missed breathing. The evidence in my writing always sucks, my innards don't prism reflect etc., and it is always deeply frustrating. I feel a little sick at the prospect of writing another one of these. I feel less fake admitting that, anyway. People look at each other as if they wish them dead. If you had another stomach for every time they made you feel sick. In her stories you know what they mean when they don't want people like this over anyone else. She would write "mercy" and it feels like another meaning of mercy. If you escaped it wasn't that they felt pity for you. You were just living in the hell hole they got charge of. This is her street. I wish that just one time I could even approach what I feel about this without hiding in my crippled descriptions of paranoia and fog and deafness in sky pictures. If you were waiting for the ground to swallow you it would be in overhead and if you were praying or just know it is going to come anyway asteroid it would be in the ground once you've stared at it for too long. If there was something that existed before this asteroid and swallowed throat puncture feeling that would be what I have about Anna Kavan. Her stories run their fingers over that before time whispering and it is that kind of silence. It doesn't matter what you say because it was always that way. That's worse than paranoia to me, or masks without faces or anything. I would forget about being creepy if it was just creepy. I believe in it.
My favorite story is Who Has Desired the Sea. A man waits to see himself. If you lived your life looking in windows and water and everything looked like you could see right through it, but lifeless, no reflection. You wait until the right man comes until you are the right one. The confusion and the outside the window voices of his girlfriend or the people in the hospital. I feel like I'm waiting for the thing that came before it so I recognize it and it gets worse and worse and emptier and emptier glass. The waiting for yourself. I know the timeless voice of this guy in her story who is waiting for that in his glass head with the swinging pendulum. Walk around and feel like you're under water. I know when I feel like that if someone else says it. This is my favorite story because it makes me feel like an underwater sea monster looking in a mirror and you don't know you're the monster. This is what it must look like to someone who doesn't want anyone else there. They want to feel right and you're wrong. It is the other side of the glass. If I read it in her story I feel like I can sense other things at once, the things that I'm not even looking at, the why of the horror. Violets "bloom inviolably" and I know them and what it is about. It's in a mental picture underneath, one where it is past too late in a doomed story. If I try to talk about it is all wrong and I'm writing more talk, talk, talk that doesn't know what it feels like to hear without sound. My reviews are bull shit but I hope an echo of the under water feeling came through. At least if I look into the drowned eyes I can listen with drowned eyes.
There is, I believe, a kind of telepathy between the condemned: a sort of intuitive recognition which can even make itself felt through the medium of the printed page. How else should I feel—without fear of appearing presumptuous, either—for this great man whom I never saw and to whom I could not have spoken, the tender, wincing, pathetic solicitude that painfully comes into being only between fellow-sufferers?
September 26, 2014
The psychological fallout of wartime, inescapable, just as it's happening. While blitz London has been eclipsed as far as understandings of the horror of world war two goes, this was written from still within its grasp, in a period that probably seemed likely to continue as indefinitely as the asylum stays and bureaucratic nightmares detailed within. Hinging upon a feverish burst of brutality and despair encompassed by a couple pages in the middle, this unfold isn two parts: the first realistic character studies built primarily out of Kavan's own experiences working in a hospital for war-borne psychological traumas upon return from New Zealand (though doubtless informed by her own psychiatric ward stays, as well) and second a series of more fanciful or suggestive elaborations, often in a distinctive Kavan mode of the suffocating inescapability of disaster. Breakdown follows (best get a *):
*I Am Lazarus: Back from the dead, yet not alive, stuck in a limbo of simulated normality. The doctors view him as a great success, top marks to the treatment, but the patient remains wiped of actual interior understanding, acting out motions he cannot understand. A highly cynical critical view of a "success story" that goes well with the sympathetic observation bits of Asylum Piece before it.
The Palace of Sleep: an unsettling tone poem of the narcosis treatment that Kavan was all too familiar with by the time of writing.
*Who Has Desired the Sea: Like the first story, this one follows an ostensibly "well" patient towards the end of his stay with the irrevocable past and its warping effects still bearing down on him even as he's pushed towards the future. Futility and despair.
The Blackout: It's notable that though these earlier tales are mostly convincingly realistic patient case studies, Kavan still dips directly into the troubled minds with great finesse and understanding, pulling out internal struggles in spasmodic bursts of stream of consciousness and narrative fracture (as here) or else attempts to render otherwise incomprehensible mental states.
Glorious Boys: And then a first person narrator who may be Kavan herself, in the realistic side of a double picture mirrored into the last story. Here, having difficulty accepting the "proper" attitude towards heroism in a situation of global war.
*The Face of My People: The last of the sanitorium case studies, perhaps the best and most chilling, of a foreigner at a loss among people unable or unwilling to understand him.
The Heavenly Adversary: a minor transition-piece heading us into more subjective terrain of the bookending personal bits of Asylum Piece.
The Brother: The ego straightjacketing itself into destruction. Introducing that familiar Kavan stifling sensation, but here in somewhat lesser form.
*The Gannets: concentrated malice, the presence of incomprehensible evil in an indifferent universe. Strangely often refered to as Hitchcockian, though it precedes the film and even the de Maurier story that description supposes it was based on by some years.
The Picture / All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive / A Certain Experience / Benjo: so here's the stretch of shadowy forces, uncaring systems, sinister inept bureaucrats. Lacks the chilling vagueness and personalness of the equivalent bits of Asylum Piece, and only foreshadows the more developed versions to follow, the long story at the end of A Bright Green Field and the culminating novel, the excellent Eagles Nest. Or even in the last story here for that matter.
Now I Know Where My Place Is: slight but imbued with eerie suggestion.
*Our City: best of the sort of piece dominating the second half (post-Gannets), and also the second more seemingly autobiographical version of Blitz London. But far more vivid, unsettling, and poetic than any of those precedents. The city as octopus, trap, and accuser.
*I Am Lazarus: Back from the dead, yet not alive, stuck in a limbo of simulated normality. The doctors view him as a great success, top marks to the treatment, but the patient remains wiped of actual interior understanding, acting out motions he cannot understand. A highly cynical critical view of a "success story" that goes well with the sympathetic observation bits of Asylum Piece before it.
The Palace of Sleep: an unsettling tone poem of the narcosis treatment that Kavan was all too familiar with by the time of writing.
*Who Has Desired the Sea: Like the first story, this one follows an ostensibly "well" patient towards the end of his stay with the irrevocable past and its warping effects still bearing down on him even as he's pushed towards the future. Futility and despair.
The Blackout: It's notable that though these earlier tales are mostly convincingly realistic patient case studies, Kavan still dips directly into the troubled minds with great finesse and understanding, pulling out internal struggles in spasmodic bursts of stream of consciousness and narrative fracture (as here) or else attempts to render otherwise incomprehensible mental states.
Glorious Boys: And then a first person narrator who may be Kavan herself, in the realistic side of a double picture mirrored into the last story. Here, having difficulty accepting the "proper" attitude towards heroism in a situation of global war.
*The Face of My People: The last of the sanitorium case studies, perhaps the best and most chilling, of a foreigner at a loss among people unable or unwilling to understand him.
The Heavenly Adversary: a minor transition-piece heading us into more subjective terrain of the bookending personal bits of Asylum Piece.
The Brother: The ego straightjacketing itself into destruction. Introducing that familiar Kavan stifling sensation, but here in somewhat lesser form.
*The Gannets: concentrated malice, the presence of incomprehensible evil in an indifferent universe. Strangely often refered to as Hitchcockian, though it precedes the film and even the de Maurier story that description supposes it was based on by some years.
The Picture / All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive / A Certain Experience / Benjo: so here's the stretch of shadowy forces, uncaring systems, sinister inept bureaucrats. Lacks the chilling vagueness and personalness of the equivalent bits of Asylum Piece, and only foreshadows the more developed versions to follow, the long story at the end of A Bright Green Field and the culminating novel, the excellent Eagles Nest. Or even in the last story here for that matter.
Now I Know Where My Place Is: slight but imbued with eerie suggestion.
*Our City: best of the sort of piece dominating the second half (post-Gannets), and also the second more seemingly autobiographical version of Blitz London. But far more vivid, unsettling, and poetic than any of those precedents. The city as octopus, trap, and accuser.
January 10, 2020
The stories in I Am Lazarus, first published in 1945, are concerned with war and its aftermath. Indeed, at its beginning the book seems saturated with sorrow and loss, a grey wash, and the first few stories paint similarly bleak pictures of young men with PTSD, in some cases suggesting they would have been better off without treatment. Then comes the transcendent 'Glorious Boys', a story in which every sentence is a grenade. It's alive and crackling with energy, but not pleasantly: alive and crackling with energy like you feel when you're having a panic attack. 'The Brother' is grief as a horror story. 'The Gannets' is a two-page scream against human cruelty that evokes 'The Birds' (interestingly, Kavan's story predates du Maurier's). Something about 'The Picture', its atmosphere of torment and humiliation, really got to me. 'All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive', 'Benjo' and 'Our City' form a trio of tales of surreal bureaucracy, harking back to Asylum Piece, in which 'official procedure' and 'the authorities' are shadowy shape-shifting enemies. This is not a perfect collection – it sometimes feels that the stories are a little mismatched – but it's filled with glimmers of Kavan's unique style and inimitable skill at portraying the isolation of madness and sadness.
Stories in this book: 'I Am Lazarus', 'The Palace of Sleep', 'Who Has Desired the Sea', 'The Blackout', 'Glorious Boys', 'The Face of My People', 'The Heavenly Adversary', 'The Brother', 'The Gannets', 'The Picture', 'All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive', 'A Certain Experience', 'Benjo', 'Now I Know Where My Place Is', 'Our City'
TinyLetter
Stories in this book: 'I Am Lazarus', 'The Palace of Sleep', 'Who Has Desired the Sea', 'The Blackout', 'Glorious Boys', 'The Face of My People', 'The Heavenly Adversary', 'The Brother', 'The Gannets', 'The Picture', 'All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive', 'A Certain Experience', 'Benjo', 'Now I Know Where My Place Is', 'Our City'
TinyLetter
January 12, 2023
More notes here:
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May 22, 2019
I am Lazarus is a collection of short stories all set in the period of the second world war and generally, most are set in Blitz-time London. Kavan is a really good writer and draws the reader into the stories with her elegant, poetic prose style which seems very effortless and flows brilliantly. A lot of the subject matter involves old-style asylums and the patients, which sounds depressing but because of the silky smooth delivery, I didn't find them too gloomy, more touching and slightly melancholic.
Other stories veer away from the asylums and tread different territory but all seem to have a haunting, surreal aura about them, leaving you wondering about the conclusions afterwards I found...
I have read three of her books now and this one is a great starting point for someone uninitiated in Kavan's unusual works- some stories being quite long, others much shorter, but all really memorable and curious in the best way possible. Why this book has so few reviews is quite astounding really!
November 13, 2017
I was slightly nervous about reading Anna Kavan for the first time, mainly because I know that, even though she’s not a household name, for those who read her they are passionately loyal; as it is, I should have had no such concerns.
I Am Lazarus is a collection of 15 stories, some quite short, published in 1945 and clearly driven from her own experiences. Some I read as direct experience, presented without comment, given to us, the reader, as a window into some of the smaller details that would easily be lost, ignored or forgotten by the history writers. These are not all-action stories, tales of bravery against insurmountable enemy or recovery against all the odds…these are what could easily be labelled as ‘other’; the stories that don’t get told as they serve no purpose for the greater war effort – but be told they must, and Anna Kavan does it perfectly.
The title story ‘I Am Lazarus’, that opens the book, is a perfect example, as is ‘Who Has Desired The Sea’.
However, it’s when Kavan turns inwards and stops observing, that the strongest writing comes forward; the final story of the book ‘Our City’ brings everything together and left me with an unusual response to any book – hopelessness. Not that things can’t get better, but that they probably won’t; and yet the narrator cannot just accept that, and a single slither of hope exists despite her effort to extinguish it
“I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope that prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.”
This is not angst, this is understanding pain at its very core.
I look forward to reading more and will turn to her novels next.
I Am Lazarus is a collection of 15 stories, some quite short, published in 1945 and clearly driven from her own experiences. Some I read as direct experience, presented without comment, given to us, the reader, as a window into some of the smaller details that would easily be lost, ignored or forgotten by the history writers. These are not all-action stories, tales of bravery against insurmountable enemy or recovery against all the odds…these are what could easily be labelled as ‘other’; the stories that don’t get told as they serve no purpose for the greater war effort – but be told they must, and Anna Kavan does it perfectly.
The title story ‘I Am Lazarus’, that opens the book, is a perfect example, as is ‘Who Has Desired The Sea’.
However, it’s when Kavan turns inwards and stops observing, that the strongest writing comes forward; the final story of the book ‘Our City’ brings everything together and left me with an unusual response to any book – hopelessness. Not that things can’t get better, but that they probably won’t; and yet the narrator cannot just accept that, and a single slither of hope exists despite her effort to extinguish it
“I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope that prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.”
This is not angst, this is understanding pain at its very core.
I look forward to reading more and will turn to her novels next.
June 17, 2022
Superb.
March 18, 2014
There's some beautiful phrasing in this. Individually, the stories are well-crafted. But, for me, something was lacking. The collection, overall, felt somehow incomplete. I missed the lush prose, the splintered psyche, the fevered surrealism, the tigers, the blood and the roses. It's all there, to a degree, but the predominant impression left upon me is just a dull, gray ache. I wanted to be startled, immersed. I wanted to see the thorn fully extracted.
Still, it's Anna Kavan. She's Anna Kavan and she published a book. Enough said!
Still, it's Anna Kavan. She's Anna Kavan and she published a book. Enough said!
July 23, 2021
Good range of short stories. Published in 1945 so majority of them are war based. I found it similar to Roald Dahl's book Kiss Kiss which may have had inspiration from this.
June 3, 2024
Ahhhhh la palabra que busco no es intimidad. Pero es como si Kavan entendiera a estos personajes, de manera profunda, y al mismo tiempo mantuviera cierta distancia para narrarlos. Es un placer enorme. No es Woolf poniéndose toda loca —aunque en algún que otro cuento sí—, wild and fluorescent.
Lo que veo único en este libro es el ritmo. Sería más acertado decir el pacing, ing, algo que está siendo. Porque fluye constantemente, pero es tan quieto. Es un desasosiego medido. Clínico pero muy bello.
Sobre el punto de vista, pensaba en cómo Sara Gallardo entiende al indio de Eisejuaz para narrarlo en primera persona. Todos los personajes de Kavan están en una. Tan en una que es imposible que digan "Yo". Pero la antología —y el primer cuento— se llaman I Am Lazarus. Están todos medio muertos. Shell-shocked.
No pude terminar de leerlo, me cansa, es demasiado bueno.
Lo que veo único en este libro es el ritmo. Sería más acertado decir el pacing, ing, algo que está siendo. Porque fluye constantemente, pero es tan quieto. Es un desasosiego medido. Clínico pero muy bello.
Sobre el punto de vista, pensaba en cómo Sara Gallardo entiende al indio de Eisejuaz para narrarlo en primera persona. Todos los personajes de Kavan están en una. Tan en una que es imposible que digan "Yo". Pero la antología —y el primer cuento— se llaman I Am Lazarus. Están todos medio muertos. Shell-shocked.
No pude terminar de leerlo, me cansa, es demasiado bueno.
November 30, 2017
intense and good at atmosphere but very 'first' 'unedited' - goes very downhill in quality as goes along. Read about half, not essential like Janet Frame but well worth reading and interesting for what it covers (mental health experiences in midcentury Britain, some generally interesting postwar and migration aspects too). I won't finish it or feel guilty about that but i read half and it's worth reading i'd say to others. It is not linked short stories. Interest: high. Writing: highly variable, but that means a couple of top quality short stories.
November 9, 2015
I've read various novellas by Anna Kavan over the years --
Ice
,
Sleep Has His House
, and
Who Are You?
. The first two I read a very long time ago, and can remember little about them, although I know they intrigued me enough to continue exploring her work. The last I read only recently, and while it was enjoyable enough, it wasn't particularly memorable. Still, Kavan continues to interest me, so I thought I'd try this collection of short stories.
The stories reflect in part Kavan's time in London during World War II, and her work at a psychiatric hospital for soldiers. The stories therefore tend to be dark with neurotic subjects. As is often the case with short story collections, some stories are enjoyable, some not so much. In particular, I found this collection slow to start, and it wasn't until about thirty pages in, with a story called "The Blackout", that I found myself becoming engaged.
Some of the stories are very short, and feel as if they were notes or experiments for longer novels. And certainly, a couple of the stories have thematic similarities -- dealing with a shadowy bureaucracy and a delayed and confusing "trial", reminiscent of The Trial -- and I felt these were experiments towards a novel; I was unsurprised to find that her posthumously published Guilty involves "a Kafkaesque bureaucracy".
These short stories are, then, probably not the best introduction to Kavan; they might instead provide, for those already familiar with her work, insight into the obsessions and interests that inform Ice or Sleep Has His House . Indeed, it is those novels I would suggest to those interested in exploring Kavan.
The stories reflect in part Kavan's time in London during World War II, and her work at a psychiatric hospital for soldiers. The stories therefore tend to be dark with neurotic subjects. As is often the case with short story collections, some stories are enjoyable, some not so much. In particular, I found this collection slow to start, and it wasn't until about thirty pages in, with a story called "The Blackout", that I found myself becoming engaged.
Some of the stories are very short, and feel as if they were notes or experiments for longer novels. And certainly, a couple of the stories have thematic similarities -- dealing with a shadowy bureaucracy and a delayed and confusing "trial", reminiscent of The Trial -- and I felt these were experiments towards a novel; I was unsurprised to find that her posthumously published Guilty involves "a Kafkaesque bureaucracy".
These short stories are, then, probably not the best introduction to Kavan; they might instead provide, for those already familiar with her work, insight into the obsessions and interests that inform Ice or Sleep Has His House . Indeed, it is those novels I would suggest to those interested in exploring Kavan.
February 16, 2022
This work follows different threads, but always comes back to fear that cannot be named. Or, to be more exact, will not be named. Each character has reasons for holding back. For the soldiers, it is their memories of the war and their life before. For the nameless women unable to escape the officials of the state, of what they are tried and convicted already. During most of the stories, literal threads of blue signify someone at the mercy of the oppressing official (the clothing of the psychiatric patient, the rug of an apartment), are the reminder that events are not in the control of those who experience them.
Published originally in 1945, "I Am Lazarus" contains some of the best writing about PTSD from the eyes of the Veteran and those treating them. With the understanding of someone who knows, Kavan was ahead of the curve with her depiction of the effects of combat trauma coupled with prior interpersonal trauma. Her descriptions of the treatments for the soldiers, as well as other asylum patients, is chilling. Kavan's depictions of war-time London during the Blitz lay bare the tension and sense of dread as planes fly over-head and air raid sirens wail.
The female characters in the second half of the book represent a modern pre-Feminist examination of the role of the woman in society. The characters are followed by a nameless judgement for unspecified actions, and are unable to escape the male officials who sit in control.
"I Am Lazarus" is an achievement many authors would love to have written. That it has been buried is a crime. It should be taught in schools, especially in Psychology, Social Work, or other mental health professions.
Another in the string of slipstream writers I've been encountering, one of the most intriguing aspects to this work is the anthropomorphism that runs throughout. It adds to the deep emotional despair just on the edge of the worlds Kavan creates.
Published originally in 1945, "I Am Lazarus" contains some of the best writing about PTSD from the eyes of the Veteran and those treating them. With the understanding of someone who knows, Kavan was ahead of the curve with her depiction of the effects of combat trauma coupled with prior interpersonal trauma. Her descriptions of the treatments for the soldiers, as well as other asylum patients, is chilling. Kavan's depictions of war-time London during the Blitz lay bare the tension and sense of dread as planes fly over-head and air raid sirens wail.
The female characters in the second half of the book represent a modern pre-Feminist examination of the role of the woman in society. The characters are followed by a nameless judgement for unspecified actions, and are unable to escape the male officials who sit in control.
"I Am Lazarus" is an achievement many authors would love to have written. That it has been buried is a crime. It should be taught in schools, especially in Psychology, Social Work, or other mental health professions.
Another in the string of slipstream writers I've been encountering, one of the most intriguing aspects to this work is the anthropomorphism that runs throughout. It adds to the deep emotional despair just on the edge of the worlds Kavan creates.
July 6, 2023
I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories by Anna Kavan is, I think, the fourth volume of fiction I have read by the author. Ice, her masterpiece, is my favorite, but she is terrific in short stories as well. I began this many months ago, reading a story or two at a time, set it aside for a time, but finished it finally now. It’s a good introduction to the range of her work and ideas. It’s mainly set in WWII and is filled with the fear, miasma, and insanity of that terrible war.
Kavan's real life already had those things in it, but war intensifies all of this. She was institutionalized for psychiatric reasons many times in her life, and she was addicted to heroin, so she’s hardly the picture of stability, and yet she was remarkably prolific and very talented, often compared to Kafka and Woolf. I think of her sometimes in the light of that Don McLean's "Vincent": "This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you," though of course lots of people didn't romanticize either Van Gogh or Kavan; they weren't nice to everyone. But both were sensitive individuals, vulnerable to the slings and arrows of the world, often overwhelmed by it.
The first section of this collection is informed by her own time working in a psych ward with soldiers who had experienced “battle fatigue,” or ptsd. Some of these stories feel almost ethnographic attempts to capture the experience of the traumas of war. Sensitive men, so damaged. Many war novels get at this mental destruction, but I was reminded in some of these stories of The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker.
Kavan distrusted doctors (part of her etiology, they’d say), and so she is sympathetic, in “I Am Lazarus," the first and title story, about the ways the psychiatric establishment “puts men to sleep with their poisoned needle.” Later in that story she sees a doctor in this way: “The Italian’s eyes, full of malice, writhed like insane tadpoles side to side.” One doctor triumphs in what he deems successful electroshock that brings a man “back to life,” as if he were Lazarus, but he will never be whole: “There was nothing at all left and nothing mattered at all.”
In other pieces, the she of the stories is herself in an asylum, paranoid, isolated: "What is it exactly that is wrong with me? What is the thing about me that people can never take?” The soldiers have trauma, in this collection, but she does, too, in part from the war: “Of course it’s lunacy; we’ve all of us gone insane, she said to herself, thinking of the planes streaming out. . . the bomber streams, gigantic serpents of metal horror circling and smashing the world.” Many stories are set in the blitz, in London: “. . . all I wished was freedom to live in peace, in sunshine, in a country where birds had not learned to fly in terror from the sound of a falling bomb.”
“The Gannets” seems to prefigure Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” in its depiction of nature’s revenge, this time for war.
“All Kinds of Grief Arrive” is one of the more Kafka-esque stories, all clerks at their desks and bureaucratic nightmare.
In “Now I know Where My Place is” (though she really doesn’t), she says, “One seems to be living in a perpetual fog” as she hopes to visit a hotel she has heard about in the town she has moved to. She thinks others don't want her to see the hotel for some unknown reason. She speaks of a “queer dream-plasma which flows along like a sub-life.” This story, like others, is mysterious, dream-like, a little ominous/paranoid.
The final story, “Our City,” would seem to be Paris, occupied by the Nazis. She’s not sure if the occupying soldiers are malevolent, as she rarely sees them, but some of the locals seem sinister to her, for no obvious reason. This is one of the longer stories, the most complex, surreal, including previous themes you find in many of the stories--paranoia, ennui, bureaucracy, madness!
There are strange themes in Kavan. In the face of war she sometimes sees madness as a kind of antidote or escape from the horrors of contemporary civilization. And like Kafka, she sees bureaucracies reinforcing the status quo, conformity. War time nightmares. Extreme? What might it be like to be living in Ukraine right now?
Inanimate objects seem to carry ominous threats for her; in the title story, the first one, the narrator notices, “Moon daisies grew in the grass. They had yellow eyes that squinted craftily in the grass.” “The wind was blowing like mad in the hospital garden. It was almost as if it knew it was near a mental hospital.”
In general this is terrific writing in the area of the surreal, and madness, where a very sensitive and vulnerable narrator is driven to terror and isolation by the state of the world. A great and strange collection. Haunting.
Kavan's real life already had those things in it, but war intensifies all of this. She was institutionalized for psychiatric reasons many times in her life, and she was addicted to heroin, so she’s hardly the picture of stability, and yet she was remarkably prolific and very talented, often compared to Kafka and Woolf. I think of her sometimes in the light of that Don McLean's "Vincent": "This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you," though of course lots of people didn't romanticize either Van Gogh or Kavan; they weren't nice to everyone. But both were sensitive individuals, vulnerable to the slings and arrows of the world, often overwhelmed by it.
The first section of this collection is informed by her own time working in a psych ward with soldiers who had experienced “battle fatigue,” or ptsd. Some of these stories feel almost ethnographic attempts to capture the experience of the traumas of war. Sensitive men, so damaged. Many war novels get at this mental destruction, but I was reminded in some of these stories of The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker.
Kavan distrusted doctors (part of her etiology, they’d say), and so she is sympathetic, in “I Am Lazarus," the first and title story, about the ways the psychiatric establishment “puts men to sleep with their poisoned needle.” Later in that story she sees a doctor in this way: “The Italian’s eyes, full of malice, writhed like insane tadpoles side to side.” One doctor triumphs in what he deems successful electroshock that brings a man “back to life,” as if he were Lazarus, but he will never be whole: “There was nothing at all left and nothing mattered at all.”
In other pieces, the she of the stories is herself in an asylum, paranoid, isolated: "What is it exactly that is wrong with me? What is the thing about me that people can never take?” The soldiers have trauma, in this collection, but she does, too, in part from the war: “Of course it’s lunacy; we’ve all of us gone insane, she said to herself, thinking of the planes streaming out. . . the bomber streams, gigantic serpents of metal horror circling and smashing the world.” Many stories are set in the blitz, in London: “. . . all I wished was freedom to live in peace, in sunshine, in a country where birds had not learned to fly in terror from the sound of a falling bomb.”
“The Gannets” seems to prefigure Daphne du Maurier’s “The Birds” in its depiction of nature’s revenge, this time for war.
“All Kinds of Grief Arrive” is one of the more Kafka-esque stories, all clerks at their desks and bureaucratic nightmare.
In “Now I know Where My Place is” (though she really doesn’t), she says, “One seems to be living in a perpetual fog” as she hopes to visit a hotel she has heard about in the town she has moved to. She thinks others don't want her to see the hotel for some unknown reason. She speaks of a “queer dream-plasma which flows along like a sub-life.” This story, like others, is mysterious, dream-like, a little ominous/paranoid.
The final story, “Our City,” would seem to be Paris, occupied by the Nazis. She’s not sure if the occupying soldiers are malevolent, as she rarely sees them, but some of the locals seem sinister to her, for no obvious reason. This is one of the longer stories, the most complex, surreal, including previous themes you find in many of the stories--paranoia, ennui, bureaucracy, madness!
There are strange themes in Kavan. In the face of war she sometimes sees madness as a kind of antidote or escape from the horrors of contemporary civilization. And like Kafka, she sees bureaucracies reinforcing the status quo, conformity. War time nightmares. Extreme? What might it be like to be living in Ukraine right now?
Inanimate objects seem to carry ominous threats for her; in the title story, the first one, the narrator notices, “Moon daisies grew in the grass. They had yellow eyes that squinted craftily in the grass.” “The wind was blowing like mad in the hospital garden. It was almost as if it knew it was near a mental hospital.”
In general this is terrific writing in the area of the surreal, and madness, where a very sensitive and vulnerable narrator is driven to terror and isolation by the state of the world. A great and strange collection. Haunting.
December 12, 2022
A solid collection from the myth, the legend, the solitary blonde: Anna Kavan, brooding in her flat, trapped in London, on the heels of war and washed in its destructive wake. I found the mental institute stories a little slow, sure, but they are important pieces on the time and strikingly real. The Kafkaesque stories are vintage Kavan, crucial to her oeuvre. And then there are a few that aren't so easily classifiable––and these are probably the best.
The collection begins with I Am Lazarus, the title story, about a man revived from catharsis. He's just wandering around an institute, a simple lad, making everyone uncomfortable. Then there's Palace of Sleep, in which a visitor is toured around the grounds of a sanitorium, culminating with a peek into a wing where the patients are kept in prolonged narcosis. The visitor does not approve. Then we have Who Has Desired the Sea, which begins with a male patient staring out of a psych ward window. He can see the beach in the distance. His fiancée visits, and they go for a walk by the sea; it is, unfortunately, "the wrong sea" in his mind. This upsets his fiancée. He is totally apathetic, gone. In The Blackout, a boy is interviewed by a therapist concerning his lapse in memory, which appears to be rooted in his learning of the death of a loved one. The mood lifts somewhat, if ephemerally, in Glorious Boys, in which a woman attends a house party at the behest of her friend. She regrets it, feels isolated––presumably how Kavan often fancied she felt. But then she sees an old acquaintance at the party, a soldier on weekend leave, whom she'd met abroad, presumably in New Zealand given the reference to a morepork. They leave the party, stroll, chat . . . until the bomb sirens sound. This is, after all, London in WW2, and though the Battle of Britain had been won, it would be a few years yet before Londoners were in the clear. The asylum stories then conclude with Face of My People, in which Dr. Pope attempts to coax the foreigner in Ward 6, Kling, onto the path of righteous recovery, but the free-spirited Williams––he who will not be but a cog––has something to say about that. Kling doesn't really talk anymore; he's clammed up after experiencing a hideous atrocity. Kavan gives these poor young men a voice. She's seen these types of men, the firsthand victims of the war. And she no doubt has her lost son in mind. But eventually she must move on, on to her own deeper, hazier troubles.
In The Heavenly Adversary, a woman struggles to understand why “he” abruptly left her, "the man in the blue suit with whom [she] was happy". Thus begins the theme of the ominous sentence, the inscrutable judgment passed down by some indeterminate power to condemn the narrator; but before exploring this shady, inescapable curse, Kavan walks us through a piercing reminiscence, titled The Brother, in which a meagre older sibling laments his remote and tragic relationship with his brother––and parents. The reader is treated to an even more disturbing story in The Gannets, the shortest and most descriptively violent piece in the collection. Next things get really Kafkaesque in The Picture, in which the foreign narrator attempts to retrieve a precious picture from an old shopkeeper who was supposed to frame it. If the narrator’s difficulty completing this errand weren’t enough, Kavan directly confirms her intentions in All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive, which recounts the misfortunes of ‘A’. The authorities had obtained a nebulous verdict condemning A to an indeterminate sentence. A was granted reprieve, however, and permitted to leave the country. But after exactly one year of supposed happiness abroad (this story is recounted by a third party), A is summoned to her home country to continue to serve her sentence. Obviously imitative of Kafka’s The Trial, Grief adds a distinct flavour to the master’s theme rather than simply reusing it. A Certain Experience follows, a two-pager in which the narrator promises to describe a “wonderful event” which remains inscrutable; we learn briefly that the narrator was imprisoned in a state reminiscent of poor Edmond Dantès and that the “experience” centers on the moment of release, though the narrator implies the aftermath of this experience proved not so wonderful. Kavan then presents Benjo, a truly peculiar and outstanding story, in which friendly Benjo, a man who lives in a run-down caravan despite a plentiful supply of cash, often visits and openly admires the narrator’s house, until the narrator’s new life in this foreign country is suddenly ripped away when an official summons arrives in the mail ordering her to return to her home country. This reads easily as a supplemental piece in the story of A, the hapless subject of Grief. Indeed it is quite tempting to consider Bengo as the reflections of A during her year abroad.
All right, with that out of my system I’ll begin a new paragraph: Now I Know Where My Place Is, the penultimate story, features a narrator who wants to visit a supposedly fashionable hotel. She (as in many of the stories, the narrator’s gender is uncertain, but I can’t help but picture the narrator as Kavan) convinces her "friends" to drive her to the hotel, but uneasiness pervades, and the narrator is equivocally whisked away by a small blonde. Kavan concludes with Our City, a ten-part story in which the narrator describes her descent into the labyrinth of an official case against her. The narrator’s city is invaded by foreign troops and grows stranger by the day. The narrator continues to attend bureaus and advisors in hope of advancing her case but, of course, everything remains vague and contrary.
I am tempted to end my review there. Vague and contrary. Yes, that about does it. I am Lazarus is a drastically undervalued work on WW2, Kafka, and the minimalist, nebulously incisive reflections of a true, troubled badass.
The collection begins with I Am Lazarus, the title story, about a man revived from catharsis. He's just wandering around an institute, a simple lad, making everyone uncomfortable. Then there's Palace of Sleep, in which a visitor is toured around the grounds of a sanitorium, culminating with a peek into a wing where the patients are kept in prolonged narcosis. The visitor does not approve. Then we have Who Has Desired the Sea, which begins with a male patient staring out of a psych ward window. He can see the beach in the distance. His fiancée visits, and they go for a walk by the sea; it is, unfortunately, "the wrong sea" in his mind. This upsets his fiancée. He is totally apathetic, gone. In The Blackout, a boy is interviewed by a therapist concerning his lapse in memory, which appears to be rooted in his learning of the death of a loved one. The mood lifts somewhat, if ephemerally, in Glorious Boys, in which a woman attends a house party at the behest of her friend. She regrets it, feels isolated––presumably how Kavan often fancied she felt. But then she sees an old acquaintance at the party, a soldier on weekend leave, whom she'd met abroad, presumably in New Zealand given the reference to a morepork. They leave the party, stroll, chat . . . until the bomb sirens sound. This is, after all, London in WW2, and though the Battle of Britain had been won, it would be a few years yet before Londoners were in the clear. The asylum stories then conclude with Face of My People, in which Dr. Pope attempts to coax the foreigner in Ward 6, Kling, onto the path of righteous recovery, but the free-spirited Williams––he who will not be but a cog––has something to say about that. Kling doesn't really talk anymore; he's clammed up after experiencing a hideous atrocity. Kavan gives these poor young men a voice. She's seen these types of men, the firsthand victims of the war. And she no doubt has her lost son in mind. But eventually she must move on, on to her own deeper, hazier troubles.
In The Heavenly Adversary, a woman struggles to understand why “he” abruptly left her, "the man in the blue suit with whom [she] was happy". Thus begins the theme of the ominous sentence, the inscrutable judgment passed down by some indeterminate power to condemn the narrator; but before exploring this shady, inescapable curse, Kavan walks us through a piercing reminiscence, titled The Brother, in which a meagre older sibling laments his remote and tragic relationship with his brother––and parents. The reader is treated to an even more disturbing story in The Gannets, the shortest and most descriptively violent piece in the collection. Next things get really Kafkaesque in The Picture, in which the foreign narrator attempts to retrieve a precious picture from an old shopkeeper who was supposed to frame it. If the narrator’s difficulty completing this errand weren’t enough, Kavan directly confirms her intentions in All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive, which recounts the misfortunes of ‘A’. The authorities had obtained a nebulous verdict condemning A to an indeterminate sentence. A was granted reprieve, however, and permitted to leave the country. But after exactly one year of supposed happiness abroad (this story is recounted by a third party), A is summoned to her home country to continue to serve her sentence. Obviously imitative of Kafka’s The Trial, Grief adds a distinct flavour to the master’s theme rather than simply reusing it. A Certain Experience follows, a two-pager in which the narrator promises to describe a “wonderful event” which remains inscrutable; we learn briefly that the narrator was imprisoned in a state reminiscent of poor Edmond Dantès and that the “experience” centers on the moment of release, though the narrator implies the aftermath of this experience proved not so wonderful. Kavan then presents Benjo, a truly peculiar and outstanding story, in which friendly Benjo, a man who lives in a run-down caravan despite a plentiful supply of cash, often visits and openly admires the narrator’s house, until the narrator’s new life in this foreign country is suddenly ripped away when an official summons arrives in the mail ordering her to return to her home country. This reads easily as a supplemental piece in the story of A, the hapless subject of Grief. Indeed it is quite tempting to consider Bengo as the reflections of A during her year abroad.
All right, with that out of my system I’ll begin a new paragraph: Now I Know Where My Place Is, the penultimate story, features a narrator who wants to visit a supposedly fashionable hotel. She (as in many of the stories, the narrator’s gender is uncertain, but I can’t help but picture the narrator as Kavan) convinces her "friends" to drive her to the hotel, but uneasiness pervades, and the narrator is equivocally whisked away by a small blonde. Kavan concludes with Our City, a ten-part story in which the narrator describes her descent into the labyrinth of an official case against her. The narrator’s city is invaded by foreign troops and grows stranger by the day. The narrator continues to attend bureaus and advisors in hope of advancing her case but, of course, everything remains vague and contrary.
I am tempted to end my review there. Vague and contrary. Yes, that about does it. I am Lazarus is a drastically undervalued work on WW2, Kafka, and the minimalist, nebulously incisive reflections of a true, troubled badass.
November 19, 2023
I have been a fan of Kavan for years, and while this was my first over books, it remains my favorite. I know ICE and Sleep Has His House usually capture more imaginations, but this one is the one that has really stuck with me. Maybe its my preference for how surprising and unexpected short stories can be? Or my terrible attention span? Hard to say. I found this book beautiful and haunting in so many ways, and as a person who has not generally had the best mental health, its hard for me to think of a book that better conveys how it is not just internally but socially experienced to be mentally ill in an industrial society.
July 25, 2019
3.5. This was super interesting and provided not only snapshots into wartime life and its aftermath, but also a really eerie and uneasy vibe. I think for me short stories just don't tend to have as much impact as novels, so I'm very interested in reading an Anna Kavan novel to see what I think of her storytelling in an extended format.
March 22, 2018
There are some awesome stories in this collection, I was really taken aback by it. Published in 1945, apart from the settings and background, this is really fresh, modern, thoughtful and hugely engaging.
September 3, 2021
A surreal (if sometimes repetitive) collection of short stories dealing with mental illness and depression. Of the two troubled "Anns" of this period I'm now reading, I think I prefer Ann Quin to Anna Kavan. But this is still worth your time.
May 15, 2020
Air raids, madness, alienation.
October 31, 2021
Beautifully written but incredibly bleak
November 12, 2021
Kavan is great. Asylum piece is my favorite. Hits home in a lot of ways. She does.
December 31, 2023
Fin novellsamling
December 5, 2024
5 million stars
January 5, 2016
Unlike Julia and the Bazooka, this collection of Kavan’s short fiction was originally published during her lifetime, and the significance of this distinction is clear. This book is more balanced, with most if not all of the stories written during a period of Kavan’s life in wartime London following her return from living abroad. While there are a few that stray beyond the more obvious parallels to Kavan’s experience, such as the gothic tale ‘The Brother’ and the horror snapshot ‘The Gannets’, most stories here reflect that distinct time in her life. Certainly Julia contains a few outstanding stories, some perhaps even better than any in this collection, particularly those written in Kavan’s surreal dream style that tends to outshine even her best modernist work. But when considering that posthumous collection as a whole, it’s hard not to wonder if the selections were strung together with more of an eye toward profit than artistic integrity (e.g., playing up the heroin angle feels cheap, and discounts Kavan’s significant literary achievements).
Full review here.
May 28, 2013
First published in 1945, Kavan's stories set in wartime Britain, partly based on her time in a psychiatric unit for shocked servicemen. A few stories are in that world, but the general bureacratic, claustrophobic world of the Home Front is explored, often with Kafkaesque tones. Paranoia and hallucination afflicts many of the narrators, a general sense of unreality and finding human behaviour alien and inexplicable.
July 23, 2022
In this book of short stories written during and after Anna Kavan's time as a nurse in a 1940s psychiatric hospital, the author uses her disconnected dreamlike style to tell wonderful stories of alienation, anxiety, paranoia, and war.
May 29, 2013
Just wow. Amazing amazing amazing. Everybody should be forced to read Kavan. She's the best. This is what u call a rave here
June 20, 2013
Fine short fiction; began in a vein that reminded me of Rebecca West (in terms of its focus on psychologically damaged soldiers), but slowly moved into a more surreal, grimly ambiguous realm.
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