The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments

by Ann Quin, Jennifer Hodgson (Editor)

This new collection of rare and unpublished writing by the cult 1960s author Ann Quin explores the risks and seductions of going over the edge. The stories cut an alternative path across innovative twentieth-century writing, bridging the world of Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan with that of Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, 20th Century, Literature, British Literature

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 9, 2018

About the author

Ann Quin (1936-1973) was a British writer noted for her experimental style. The author of Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972), she committed suicide in 1973 at the age of 37.

Quin came from a working-class family and was educated at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament. She trained as a shorthand typist and worked in a solicitor's office, then at a publishing company when she moved to Soho and began writing novels.

Despite a complete re-print of her works by the Dalkey Archive Press, Quin's work has yet to see the critical attention many people claim it deserves.

Reviews

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

My eye was caught by the Guardian's review of this book back in January here, which intrigued me - Quin was a British experimental novelist who died young in 1973 and has since been largely forgotten, but she has some distinguished admirers. This collection brings together various short stories and other pieces, plus the 50 pages of the novel she was working on when she died, which gives the collection its title.

The collection is stylistically varied. Some of the early pieces are raw and visceral, often written in short fragmentary sentences. Others are harder to decrypt and (dare I say it) have aged less well. The subject matter includes childhood memories, sexuality and mental illness, and there is never any sentimentality. I found the collection surprisingly readable for experimental fiction, but I am not sure how much will remain in the mind. I would be interested in tracking down at least one of Quin's four published novels.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quin’s incomplete novel, the titular piece published here, is one of her most remarkable prose works: a startling autobiographical exploration of a psychiatric collapse, set in an institution similar to the various she attended in her last troubled years. The remaining stories showcase her unquiet and skittish creative mind, the strongest (for me) the stories that share the bleak interiority of her first novel Berg. ‘Nude and Seascape’ is an unsettling story featuring a man burying a female corpse, and ‘A Double Room’ captures a miserable attempt at a torrid affair ruined by impotence, the latter one of Quin’s funnier pieces, and ‘Eyes That Watch Behind the Wind’ is a lyrical story set in Mexico featuring a more lucid form of abstract writing. The less successful fragments are the cut-up stories ‘Tripticks’ (later her last novel), ‘Living in the Present’ and some strange blips written for an artist boyfriend. Her prose is often abstruse to the point reading for pleasure becomes a chore, such as in ‘Ghostworm’ or ‘Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails’, two inscrutable pieces where the staccato sentences and minglings of narrator and character rarely produce any notable effect. Two self-portraits ‘Leaving School — XI’ and ‘One Day in the Life of a Writer’ offer a brief peep into Quin’s personality, something that remains elusive and mercurial across her strange and blackly comic writings.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ann Quin is one of the great 20th century experimentalists bridging modernism and post-modernism over a series of increasingly brilliant novels over the decade of 1964 - 1973 prior to her untimely death. As such, it's unbelievable that we had to wait until this year to get a collection of he short fiction into print. It's all here: surreal beachscapes, drearily perceptive investigations into everyday life (of middling love affairs, of the struggling writer), ghost-written monologues, whiplash-inducing cut-up experiments, an early form of her masterpiece Tripticks, and, at last, a surviving fifty page fragment of her great unfinished 5th novel, the real treasure here. A subjective asylum story in the best tradition of Nerval, Kavan, Carrington, and Zurn, this one burns with the candid particulars of a personal fragmentation of reality, and, worse, the inability of others to really care or attempt to ai the sufferer outside of the check boxes of lingering-sense-of-responsibility or institutional bare minimums. As such, chilling. And with that, a great close to 2017.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ann Quin is one of my favorite writers, and while I won't go so far as to say this collection disappointed me, it certainly did not measure up to the high bar set by her novels (nor should I have expected it to). While the word 'fragments' in the subtitle held a certain allure when I first saw it, in truth the word 'fragments' here refers to literal fragments, as in unfinished, probably unintentionally so, having not ever been published (and perhaps not ever intended to have been). This gets at the issue of posthumous publication, about which I am a perpetual fence-sitter. In Quin's case, of course, there was very little published during her lifetime, outside of her four novels. It was almost inevitable then, given the recent (minor) resurgence of interest in her work, that a collection such as this would appear.

The centerpiece here is Quin's unfinished manuscript for her fifth novel The Unmapped Country, the majority of which was previously published in Giles Gordon's anthology Beyond the Words. The missing piece, which comes at the end, is a powerful segment, leaving one to wonder why it wasn't also included in the anthology. With Gordon's book long out of print, the return of this novel fragment to print is what makes publication of this collection so important and worthwhile. It follows the experience of a young woman named Sandra during her harrowing time spent in a psychiatric ward, and offers a scathing critique of this type of so-called mental health care, where patients are warehoused, doped up, and micromanaged like a herd of docile farm animals. The closing section is Sandra's first-person immersive narrative describing an extended event of fractured reality permeated by paranoia.

Let her think I'm mad, let them all think that, so readily they will claim their superiority over fear.

I found the stories that round out the collection to be hit or miss. One entitled 'Tripticks', is clearly the basis for her novel of the same name, which happens to be the one book of hers that didn't appeal much to me. 'Nude and Seascape' is a particularly strong example of Quin's abilities tangential to the quasi-horror, weird genre. Others in the collection also align either with this type, or a related neo-Gothic type, with varying degrees of success. The first four in the collection were probably my favorites, and within these is what feels to me like the most thinly autobiographical of Quin's writing. However, this is not a quality I see in her novels, and in fact these stories felt more like a writer finding her voice, one which would mature into the one found in her novels. At odds with my impression, though, are the source notes, which indicate most of the stories appear to have been written concurrently with the novels.

I would not recommend this book to readers unfamiliar with Quin. If anything, it's probably left unread until one has fully explored her novels and obtained a greater understanding of her themes and stylistic preoccupations. I'm giving it four stars, but most of that is for The Unmapped Country. The rest of the collection rates more like a three.

The long night stretched out. Wind rattled the windows, and snow mixed with hail pounded like small fists against glass. In the middle of the dormitory, a nurse read or slept under a lamp. Sandra stared at this light until it spun from its orbit and approached. Right at the very beginning - but there was no beginning. Vague notes for the basis of a shape. The first section interrupted by the last. No continuous movement. A starting point somewhere. Chord superimposed on chords. The pendulum swung back.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Largely fascinating and enjoyable (always fascinating; not always enjoyable). At times the fragments are impossible to reconfigure in comprehensible shapes, and I think I prefer the slightly-warped version of Quin, rather than the aggressively avant garde (Isabel Waidner has, I would guess, definitely read this). But there are some unmissable pieces here, the brilliant and horrible A Double Room and the following, which show you the kind of conditions in which Quin was expected to work, and possibly partly illustrate how those unique and peerless sentences were formed, under threat at all times from myriad interruptions and money worries and the thing she eventually had enough of, Life.



'ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF A WRITER

Woke up from dream of my publisher handing me a cheque, to the post—letter from my publisher regret Arts Council have refused a grant, no reason given… That’s ’cos they read what I did with the last one. Ah well on to a passable crap. Retreat into ex-tenant’s room to write, confronted by a little heap of dust, bugs, etc., landlady has brushed up, cursing I put into dustpan to the sound of ‘do you want some coffee now or later are you warm enough in there what do you want for lunch there’s kippers, lamb stew, eggs or bacon or…?’. Close door and confront blank paper in typewriter. Look at some notes made from Harry Guntrip’s book on Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self. ‘Patients become inaccessible emotionally, when the patient seems to be bodily present but mentally absent.’ ‘I went down into a tower and then had to go through a tunnel to get out. Though I had come in that way I was horrified.’ ‘The symptoms were a defence against guilt and depression about his hostility to his mother. He was orally dependent on her. In this connexion it is significant that he sucked his thumb all his life.’ I start my round of oral masturbation with a cigarette. Window cleaner props ladder outside and stares in. Re-start novel; finally get the tone right, decide that’s the most important part of it all: the tone.

Lunch. Walkies along the Front with Mother. We sit down. ‘Look at that it looks like a Martian look he’s coming to get you—’ Umhhhh? A large piece of shitty paper bounces along. ‘Oh God he’s coming to sit next to us come on dear let’s move.’ Ummhhh? ‘No thank God he’s decided to sit next to them.’

Library—practically empty except for the section I want. The usual eccentric-looking fraternity gathered around the Psychology section.

Open a book on Hostility and read ‘You can guess what happened, if you do not already know. In the wee hours of the morning Stretch would tiptoe to the door of the guest room, open it ever so softly, and peek in, just to make sure. You can also guess what he saw and what utter consternation seized him at finding his guest either too short or too long—never a perfect fit. And now, knowing how it was that Stretch was trying so hard to be a perfect host, it is quite easy to see that next he simply had to do what he did.’

Back along the Front where Bergy men furtively walk, sit, spit and mutter. Back home and nice tea dear. Start decorating and spend most of the time wiping off emulsion drops from parquet flooring, burn hole in carpet from cigarette, burn hole in table lampshade. Give up in despair and foul temper. Back to writing the tone is all wrong. I’m no longer capable of writing that’s why the Arts Council—they know you know. Watch tele. Watch myself watching and being watched by Mother in between her sleep, and hear her shudder as an old woman comes on. And so to bed.'

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elusive, challenging, inchoate. On my map, it's like Beckett by way of Burroughs. The style throughout, except for the title story, is comprised mostly of very short omnidirectional outbursts, shuffling dialogue, thought, description, narration, and commentary without any overt indications. The cover art is apt, although it reads rougher around the edges. And most of the time it works well. There is a frenzied sense of desperation, of visceral struggle to give it form before time runs out and it vanishes forever. I am left wanting more and hoping I can find it in her novels. It seems like she was only beginning to find her voice.

[Paige · Rating 4 out of 5]

misc. thoughts as review:

i was pleasantly surprised by this collection of ann quin's unpublished writing. this being my first time reading her, i feel that the comparison to kathy acker and especially chris kraus on the back is merely marketing - her greatest similarities to the above are being a female, experimental writer. quin's writing is certainly not the schizoid, cut-up raw red cunt-ness of acker and none of the self conscious art-writing-theory-fiction-gossip of kraus. firstly, foremostly i suspect for anyone reading, quin's reading feels inescapably british, lending it a more provincial air, hardly susceptible to any of the rock n roll mythos of kraus/acker and decidedly weirder.

last year, i saw jennifer hodgson, the editor of this book, speak at housmans alongside anne boyer. one of the labels that is frequently used to describe ann quin is as a working class writer. boyer read her poem 'not writing' from garments against women alongside quin' alongside quin's 'one day in the life of a writer', try doing this too if you like. one of the special things about quin's writing is that it's flowing, surrealism is never entirely detached from the confines of the world - work, money, rent, aspirational middle class manners, parents - that shape it. this is a writing that perhaps confesses something without failing to confess a key secret to the world of so much feminist-experimental-writing, the class antagonisms and struggles that define the world - often present in as much of the awkward english parochialism evident in the stories 'a double room' and 'every cripple has his own way of walking'.

for me, this really all came together with the titular piece, quin's unfinished novel, 'the unmapped country'. this story appears to be drawn mostly on quin's own experience with madness or something akin to 'psychosis' (not that she ever describes it in any such clinical way, allowing us to experience the imaginative richness, beauty, and anxiety of an 'episode') and psychiatric institutions. this rings true with my own experience in hospital way more than anything i've read before. even reading this is quite sad as even in the unglamorous account of an NHS psychiatric ward, it's clear that austerity has taken a massive toll and stripped even the meagre resources available to people in these glorified psychiatric prisons.

'as a chicanx' (ack), let it be my duty to say that the story, 'eyes that watch the wind' is as full of cringing discomfort (totally unintentional) that you would expect from a british writer 'exploring' rural mexico and finding herself outside the capital with indigenous people. like replete with that oh-so relatable annoyance at all the brown noisiness and undercurrent of anxiety about the threat posed by local men. i would probably describe quin as a 'psychological' writer, unflinching etc. etc. but the limits of this can start to show when we leave england to a territory where the writer knows her antagonisms much less well than she thinks.

[RobPalindrome · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vivid, surreal and hallucinatory. Beautiful and haunting. Some pieces are certainly a lot better than others, but as a whole this book merits repeat visits.

Thank you for making this available And Other Stories!

[Nadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ann Quin is part of an important group of British women writers whose literary production has been ignored by the canon for decades after their deaths, and who are now slowly being brought back to the fore. I feel as though I have righted a gaping wrong in my reading of this collection of stories by Ann Quin.

Quin was an experimentalist writer of the 60s. She wrote novels and short stories and this collection captures two types of material: stories that follow a linear narratives like "Nude and Seascape", "A double room", "Every cripple has his own way of walking", "Motherlogue" and "The Unmapped Country".

And stories akin to flash fiction, structured like vignettes that the title appropriately calls 'fragments' because Quin's style of story telling is narrative fragmentation.

Quin structures her narrations in these types of stories by playing with punctuation to create rhythm - now found in A girl is a half formed thing by Eimar McBride, Peach by Emma Glass, or Grief is a thing with feathers by Max Potter. I love how this rhythmic type of writing and composition is used by these writers to convey trauma & hurt, and by Quin to convey tension and distress. Quin suffered from severe depression, she underwent electro-shock treatment, and it is therefore no surprise to find that psychiatry and mental health are big themes in these stories.

Readers who enjoy the narrative style of The White Book by Han Kang, and the merging of reality and psychotic episodes in Kang's The Vegetarian will enjoy Quin's stories that delve in the same.

Quin produced four novels, and began a fifth that remained unfinished, she committed suicide in 1973. The beginning of her fifth novel is part of this collection, a real treasure here. It is the titular story 'The Unmapped Country'.

'The Unmapped Country' is set in a psychiatric ward and follows a woman interned there. Quin reverses insanity and sanity here. Madness is the reality of this woman's internment (the insane behaviours she notices). In parallel to these observations she recounts the visions she has of being hunted, and the grasp on lucidity she thought she had is quickly shown as being psychotic. It reminded me of Lunar Caustic by Malcolm Lowry whom I love.

All stories explore the sexual tension in relationships, the tension between parent and child. A common setting to these stories is the seaside or seaside towns.

Quin's tone is dark but also often farce-like because she picks on the absurd. This balancing act between the absurd and the somber and strange atmospheres reminded me of Robert Aickman.

Thank you And Other Stories for the free copy of this collection.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 4 out of 5]

While some writers seek to find their voice, Ann Quin seemed to have a need to explore voices. Her narrators and main characters are female, male, children, passive, angry, feminist, conservative, well off, working class. In these fourteen fragments, only some of which have been published before, we can see Quin pushing further and further into an “unmapped country” of writing. Written over a brief period of something like seven years between 1966-1973, at least four of the stories in The Unmapped Country are jaw-droppingly powerful, each in their own Quin-quirky way: “A Double Room,” “”Every Cripple Has His Own Way of Walking,” “Never Trust a Man who Bathes with his Fingernails,” and The Unmapped Territory.” (And how about Quin’s titles?)

But my favorites are these three. “A Double Room” is a devastating story of a woman alternately struggling to/refusing to come to terms with her loneliness and her need/hatred for men. In “Eyes That Watch Behind the Wind,” an Englishwoman and an American man traveling through Mexico attend a bullfight—”the meeting place of challenge”—which becomes a description of their tense, tenuous relationship. In "The Unmapped County," we first meet Sandra, she is being treated in a mental institution, locked in a daily battle with uncaring doctors and nurses, psychiatrists who make no real effort to understand their patients, and dismal living conditions. In the story's second part we watch Sandra’s unraveling mind and her relationship with Clive, a painter whose days as her boyfriend are numbered.

For a much longer review, check out my blog.

[John Conway · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘After her death in 1973 at only 37, Ann Quin’s star first dipped beneath the horizon, disappearing from view entirely, before rising slowly but persistently, to the point that it’s now attaining the septentrional heights it always merited. I suspect that she’ll eventually be viewed, alongside BS Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter.’ Tom McCarthy

http://www.andotherstories.org/book/t...

[Charlie Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve never been that into the idea of reading some’s previously unpublished writing. Often, I imagine they were unpublished for a reason and besides – the last thing I want is the British Museum going through my discarded rubbish when I’m gone. In this case though, it seems churlish to turn down the opportunity, partly because the unpublished stuff comes with uncollected stuff, and partly because Quin saw a mere four books published in her lifetime.

There is also, to be fair, little rubbish here. True, the opening piece of life-writing underwhelms, but much else shows that other few do the Absurd as horrifyingly as Quin and give a fascinating glimpse into her development, demonstrate the importance of her legacy, or both. Into the first camp fall the previously unpublished Nude and Seascape, which surely served as a dry run for a significant passage in Berg, her first novel, and A Double Room, which revisited the seaside town in which the latter is set. Other stories – the extraordinary Motherlogue, for example, or Ghostworm – revisit the uncompromising form and the inimical psychic claustrophobia of Three, another novel, while Tripticks presumably contains elements that would become the novel of the same name (one I haven’t read).

As for her legacy, better critics than me have contextualised her work but is it too much to suggest that Living In the Present (co-written with Robert Sward) is a conceptual forerunner of JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which was published 4 years later? Or that Janice Galloway read The Unmapped Country before she wrote The Trick is to Keep Breathing? Not just one for the completists, then:

‘If she had gone by instinct that night. All those nights. Seen the signs. What use now? I want to recapitulate, gather in the threads. Leave it for them to do, the fuzz, jerks like that take the notes have tem recorded, what do you want to imitate? A history. One man’s history aie. Find the clues. They’re around you, in you, with you. Yes you are. You want to be objective, see how things tie up, the cause and effect all so Freudian, memory psychological shit. Oh go to hell. I’ve been. Just leave me I want to reconstruct. She raised her hands to the fire. Raised her face to his. Facing the rain in an orange grove. The avoidance of it in England, the umbrella life. How can that country hold anything for me now? Squared-off fields. Cabbage patches. Clipped hedges. Axe-happy gardeners. Clipped voices. Don’t forget the bluebells. Yes, they can call. Cuckoo. Well allow me something out of that country. Safe little island that’s going to sink into the channel any minute with Her Majesty reading out Rule Britannia we shall never be slaves – how does it go? Ask me another…’

[Al Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a handful of impressive short stories here laced with humour, wit and densely painted qualia without any room for wasted words. My first impression was one of joy in that Quin wasn't an author to fuck around with padding and fluff, she's as to the point as a writer can be and this skill in enviable to say the least.
Imagine my disappointment, then, when the remainder of the stories present themselves as close encounters of the pretentious kind. The style and tone of Quin's writing is distinct but her voice and the overall quality of the stories is inconsistent at best. Perhaps this is due to the fragmentary nature of this collection, but poorly executing an idea and saying "yeah, but I meant to fuck it up" just doesn't cut it.
By all means, read 'Leaving School - XI', 'Nude and Seascape', 'A Double Room', 'Tripticks' and 'One Day in the Life of a Writer' but avoid the rest.

[Taylor Napolsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. I think this is what literature is supposed to do when it’s at its best. Some of these stories just tore my heart in half.

If you like edgy, experimental fiction that is (mostly) readable, this is for you.

This other review I read for this said (and I completely agree) this is how we rewrite history—basically lifting up women writers who, so undeservingly, haven’t gotten near the acclaim or rep they ought to have.

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure brilliance! Some quotes:
"The scream moved up into the lump. A fist thrust in her throat. Spread out. The scream emerged in a coughing bout."
"Waves of blackness swallowed up the houses."
"Suburbs crawled in and out."

I am enamored. LOVE the movement of her language. Will read everything she wrote!

[Denzil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really very good pieces in here, lots of differing styles of writing some more experimental some quite straight but always with a sense of conflict between what is going on in the head and that in the outside world. Will read one of her novels soon.

[james !! · Rating 4 out of 5]

bittersweet to finish off all of Quin’s published works. such a terrifically unique writer! Quin’s often manic, lucid writing bodes quite well for a short story format, leaving so many questions & images for you to mull over after finishing. no other writer creates such a whirlwind of emotions for me. the shock, horror & awe that Quin embeds in her words is just sublime! only dropped a star simply because there’s a few moments where i just wish there was more, but for somewhat unfinished work/ideas it’s all terrific!

[Miguel Vian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard reading for both content and style, but rewarding. A highly original and experimental writer, her existencial anguish is so tangible in these texts that many of them are truly difficult to endure. The story that gives title to the collection, "The Unmapped Country", is exquisite: sensitive, ironical, brutally but poetically true in its tragicomedy (and probably based on her own experience with mental illness). A pity that she died so young, her writing skills are easy to see in these "stories and fragments".

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spiky. Rather frightening really - great down to earth phrasing whilst coming completely unmoored, I felt uncomfortably that the mind a very delicate mechanism living in a grubby world and unpredictable body, easily spinning out, maybe a sense that the significance of things can be rearranged for oneself quite easily without noticing that no longer quite right. Very good on odd touchstones in language, getting across that phrases have more meaning for the speaker or thinker or have been repeated off page and have underlayers part unseen. Also very good at withholding some of the reasoning behind actions so that even the (probably) ordinary seems insane. And on the other hand getting down a kind of loss of reality that involves excess of reasoning. Quite funny, although not in a way that makes it easy to laugh.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first of Quinn's books I have managed to get a hold of, and I will preface this review with the acknowledgment that that was my mistake. This is a collected work of much of her early and/or unfinished work - and as such I imagine it is of most interest to the completist, who wants to trace her stylistic influences. This runs the gamut from (to my mind) relatively unsuccessful experimentations with avant-garde writing forms of the 1960s ('Living in the Present' seemed particularly exhausting) to some of the more stylistically conventional but haunting 'seaside noirs' of 'Nude and Seascape' and 'A Double Room' - which I thoroughly enjoyed and which suggest I might have done better starting with her novel Berg. Other personal highlights included 'Ghostworm', 'Motherlogue', 'Never Trust a Man Who Bathes With His Fingernails', and 'Tripticks'.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixture of works, most of it autobiographical to varying degrees. There is a straightforward memoir of her journey from school-leaver to published novelist. The title comes from the longest piece, a fragment of an unpublished novel about a woman having a psychotic breakdown and subsequent hospitalisation. The other shorter pieces range across the world and different characters, yet the central viewpoints all seem to share the distinctive Quin stance: detached, involved with the emotional lives of others, yet not fully engaged and always ready to break away, expecting disappointment (the lover is usually old and male and having other opportunities). Switching back and to between first and third persons heightens a sense of a divided self.

[Owen Knight · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ann Quin was an experimental novelist who died aged 37 in 1973. This collection brings together fragments of her work, including part of an unfinished novel. Many of the stories are written in a staccato style, with clipped sentences and no punctuation marks for direct speech. This can give the writing a certain urgency but, reading the whole collection together, it becomes repetitive.
The stories are often original in their content and are told unemotionally.
An interesting introduction, although I don't think I have the stamina to read one of her novels.

[Guido Eekhaut · Rating 3 out of 5]

The stories are not actually stories, not in the classical sense, but fragments of a life, fragments of a reality. Quin is a cult figure, and as such has worked in the margin. This book rightfully brings to our attention some of her shorter material, which lacks a bit of coherence but is nevertheless an excellent intro to her writing.

[Augustus Jasmin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned about Ann Quin recently from an author's note in JG Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition." Coincidentally, it appears the cult British author's work is in the process of being reprinted This year. This rarities collection is pretty interesting, but I'm looking forward to getting my hands on her signature novel, "Berg."

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's tough to review a collection that's partially finished, but this book had flashes of pure genius, and was 100 times more entertaining than many of the overhyped short story collections I've read in the past couple of years. Standout stories were Motherlogue and the one about the mermaid on the beach.

[Branka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vivid, rich, full on....brilliant!

[Boo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult read. Bits of it are fantastic and Nude and Seascape is worth the read but its not an easy book. Do not pack this on your holidays!

[lucy 🌀 · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5/5 stars

[ines · Rating 4 out of 5]

the unmapped country is <3

[Kathleen Creedon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was kind of funky and wonderful. I discovered Quin after I tried to find any Djuna Barnes titles at my library (there aren't any!!), but the search feature suggested this compilation of short stories and fragments instead.

Ann Quin is a British writer who was a relatively unspoken part of the experimental literary movement of the '60s. She died by suicide just a few years after she wrote this, following a lifetime of mental illness and distress (this collection over previously unread works was published posthumously in 2018). I normally skip intros to books (sue me), but I decided to read this one since I was going into it with know idea who she was or what kind of stuff she wrote, and it was illuminating. I think this book must be the prototype for auto fiction because it's partially autobiographical, though intertwined with some chaotic and near-nonsensical short stories. It's a little disorienting.

Though after her death she has received generous praise from *some* authors/her contemporaries, she is largely forgotten, but she's revolutionary !!! Truly a whole new reading experience, unlike other experimental or avant-garde works I've read, and it all feels so natural. She really shines through it, which is a nice sort of memorial to her. She worked job to job, lived paycheck to paycheck and experienced severe depression, anxiety and even electroshock therapy before she died in 1973.

I'd recommend this for anyone who's a big poetry read, who's bored with reading the same old stuff or who is interested in the intersection of mental illness and art.

Another fun thing is that she describes Catholic school in the most perfect way: A ritualistic culture that gave me a conscience. A death wish and a sense of sin. Also a great lust to find out, experience what evil really was.