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Julia and the bazooka,: And other stories
This posthumous collection of stories contains some of Kavan's most compelling work. It owes much to her personal experiences, particularly her lifelong addiction to heroin. An important literary work, it highlights the shadowed world of the incurable drug addict and probes the psychological aspects of addiction.
157 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 1970
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1476 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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August 26, 2021
‘Whatever I am, I’m among the lost things—I do know that.’
To enter the works of Anna Kavan is to enter a swirling, menacing reality where inexorable doom weighs heavy through each word. Each story in Julia and the Bazooka is comprised of a thinly-fictionalized version of Kavan’s own life and viewpoints, allowing it to convey to the reader her heavy burdens of existence in a world that she perceived as vile and threatening. Her prose elevates even the slightest of actions to tremendous pitches of trauma and disgust while maintaining a silky perfection that keeps the reader burning for more despite the gruesome scenes that come with it. Unveiling herself through her fiction, Kavan focuses on her hatred for life and the vices that fog her reality across fifteen gritty tales of anguish and addiction.
It is nearly unbearable at times to endure Kavan’s impression of the world.
To escape her horrors, Kavan turned to drugs and her heroin addiction pulses through the veins of each story, as inseparable from the action as it was from her own life. First introduced to drugs by her tennis instructor ‘to improve her game’, Kavan became firmly addicted to heroin while hanging about with a group of racecar drivers, the events of her happiness in their circle and her subsequent depression upon fading away from it are chronicled in the story World of Heroes, and relied on it as a crutch to escape a world that so repulsed her. Like when engulfed in fog, it helped her ‘by blurring the world…so that it looked vague and unreal,’ she writes in the story , a story about running down a young man in the street, happy that she can’t be repulsed by him as a human and seeing him in the fog as a mere dummy, then feeling detached from the later police questioning. She is shown as never without her syringe, which she refers to as her ‘bazooka’; ‘she knows all the sensational stories about drug addiction, but the word bazooka makes nonsense of them, makes the whole drug business seem not serious.’
Fast cars and heroin are the common motifs in each story, both used as an escape from the world and often used as a metaphor of one another. The blend of cars and heroin as a method of escape is at its most poignant in the story High In the Mountains, where every image carries a heavy weight as a metaphor for heroin. ‘How beautiful the snow is when it covers the ground, hiding all the mess and ugliness man has made under its calm austere white.’ Kavan openly admits her addiction to heroin and feels no shame in it. ‘A clean white powder is not repulsive; it looks pure, it glitters, ther pure white crystals sparkle like snow.’
Kavan’s relationship with Dr. Bluth, or M as he is called in this book, plays a critical role in many of the stories. As described in Virginia Ironside’s introduction, Dr. Bluth was a psychiatrist who ‘persuaded [Kavan] to register with the Home Office as a heroin addict so that he could supply her, legally, until his death.’ Stories such as Zebra-Struck and Mercedes focus on their intense, platonic relationship and how she saw him as the only bright light in her existence.
These short stories give the reader a full view of Kavan’s tragic existence. We suffer through with her as she must interact with humanity, which she finds incredible abhorrent, and feel trapped in a nightmarish world along with her. Of particular interest are the first story, The Old Address, which give a blunt and violent view of Kavan’s mindset which towers over all the other stories with it’s surrealistic poetry and claustrophobic tones, and the title story which presents the entire life of Julia (or is it Kavan herself?) in a jarring montage of visceral imagery ranging from her as a young child loving flowers, to failed marriages and finally to her ashes resting in a tennis trophy for her cliffside burial beside her beloved syringe. This story would have been written not long before heroin claimed the life of Kavan. With it’s dark, almost pessimistic tones and gritty descriptions, this collection of short stories makes for an incredible window into the life and mind of a fantastic author. However, one look will haunt the reader forever. The prose remains consistently powerful across each story and contains the same lucid terrors found in Ice, as both works were written around the same time. Highly recommended for any fan of Anna Kavan.
4/5
But nothing is left of Julia really, she is not there. The only occupant of the pigeon-hole is the silver cup, which can’t think or laugh or remember. There is no more Julia anywhere. Where she was there is only nothing.
Self portraits by Anna Kavan
To enter the works of Anna Kavan is to enter a swirling, menacing reality where inexorable doom weighs heavy through each word. Each story in Julia and the Bazooka is comprised of a thinly-fictionalized version of Kavan’s own life and viewpoints, allowing it to convey to the reader her heavy burdens of existence in a world that she perceived as vile and threatening. Her prose elevates even the slightest of actions to tremendous pitches of trauma and disgust while maintaining a silky perfection that keeps the reader burning for more despite the gruesome scenes that come with it. Unveiling herself through her fiction, Kavan focuses on her hatred for life and the vices that fog her reality across fifteen gritty tales of anguish and addiction.
It is nearly unbearable at times to endure Kavan’s impression of the world.
’I know I’ve got a death-wish. I’ve never enjoyed my life, I’ve never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be. Human beings are hateful; I loathe their ugly faces and messy emotions. I’d like to destroy them all, People have always been horrible to me; they’ve always rejected me and betrayed me. Not one of them has ever been kind. Not one single person has even attempted to understand me, to see things from my point of view. They’ve all been against me, ever sine I can remember, even when I was six years old. What sort of human beings are these, who can be inhuman to a child of six? How can I help hating them all? Sometimes they disgust me so much that I feel I can’t go on living among them—that I must escape from the loathsome creatures swarming like maggots all over the earth’Certainly not a pleasant depiction of life. By stepping into her mind, Kavan manages to build an incredible empathy, aided of course by her irresistibly beautiful prose. The reader is told of her tragic childhood under an obdurate mother who despised her for not being born male, and, especially if the reader has read several of her other stories, begins to pity her for her victim status. While she evinces a clouded perception due the victimization, being embraced by hatred and coldness instead of love, that forged her in childhood, she is acutely aware of her slanted views and refuses to apologize for them. She hates everything around her, and the disgust that the world shows back at her only solidifies her perceptions. ‘And I thought, maladjusted to what, for heaven’s sake?’ she asks in Out and Away, a depiction of her time spent at a private school and of her early awareness to her damaged mental states, ‘To their stupid school? I certainly hope I am.’ She admits that she exists in a perception that she has created, and feels swallowed up and helpless within it.
’Why am I locked in this nightmare of violence, isolation and cruelty? Since the universe only exists in my mind, I must have created the place, loathsome, foul as it is. I live alone in my mind, and alone I’m being crushed to suffocation, immured by the walls I have made. It’s unbearable. I can’t possibly live in this terrible, hideous, revolting creation of mine.’Society has created a life for her devoid of love and support. Years of abuse from family, lovers, institutions have created a frightening realm around her. What is especially heart-breaking is her admission that, despite her hatred for humanity, how being among these people that she depicts in extreme, revolting details, is preferable to the solitude of her inner world. ‘I sometimes wonder if,’ she writes in A Town Garden, ‘in the last resort, the parks with their swarming crowds may not be preferable to the silent emptiness of an enclosed garden, where no one, not even a ghost, ever speaks a word.’ How terrible she must have felt in every waking moment.
To escape her horrors, Kavan turned to drugs and her heroin addiction pulses through the veins of each story, as inseparable from the action as it was from her own life. First introduced to drugs by her tennis instructor ‘to improve her game’, Kavan became firmly addicted to heroin while hanging about with a group of racecar drivers, the events of her happiness in their circle and her subsequent depression upon fading away from it are chronicled in the story World of Heroes, and relied on it as a crutch to escape a world that so repulsed her. Like when engulfed in fog, it helped her ‘by blurring the world…so that it looked vague and unreal,’ she writes in the story , a story about running down a young man in the street, happy that she can’t be repulsed by him as a human and seeing him in the fog as a mere dummy, then feeling detached from the later police questioning. She is shown as never without her syringe, which she refers to as her ‘bazooka’; ‘she knows all the sensational stories about drug addiction, but the word bazooka makes nonsense of them, makes the whole drug business seem not serious.’
Fast cars and heroin are the common motifs in each story, both used as an escape from the world and often used as a metaphor of one another. The blend of cars and heroin as a method of escape is at its most poignant in the story High In the Mountains, where every image carries a heavy weight as a metaphor for heroin. ‘How beautiful the snow is when it covers the ground, hiding all the mess and ugliness man has made under its calm austere white.’ Kavan openly admits her addiction to heroin and feels no shame in it. ‘A clean white powder is not repulsive; it looks pure, it glitters, ther pure white crystals sparkle like snow.’
Kavan’s relationship with Dr. Bluth, or M as he is called in this book, plays a critical role in many of the stories. As described in Virginia Ironside’s introduction, Dr. Bluth was a psychiatrist who ‘persuaded [Kavan] to register with the Home Office as a heroin addict so that he could supply her, legally, until his death.’ Stories such as Zebra-Struck and Mercedes focus on their intense, platonic relationship and how she saw him as the only bright light in her existence.
’It was as if she’d always been lost and living in chaos, until this man had appeared like a magician and put everything right. The few brief flashes of happiness she had known before had always been against a permanent background of black isolation, a terrifying utter loneliness, the metaphysical horror of which she’d never been able to convey to any lover or psychiatrist. Now suddenly, miraculously, that terror had gone; she was no longer alone, and could only respond with boundless devotion to the miracle worker.’However, as in Obsessional, Kavan became suicidal under the crushing depression that befell her after his death.
‘Since he’d gone, the world had become unnervingly strange. There was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go. She felt lost, lonely, dazed, deprived of everything, even of her identity, which was not strong enough to survive without his constant encouragement and reassurance.’Having seen the hopeful transformation in Kavan with Bluth, despite the obsessive and portentous doom that comes with it, the sadness of the character in an event that may mirror his Bluth's death is especially heart breaking. What hurts most is seeing the potential for strengths that lie inside of Kavan and watching her be robbed of them and cornered into the deep, dark depression that is always looming over her incredibly talented and brilliant mind. Kavan also offers extensive views on her failed second marriage with the alcoholic artist Stuart Edmonds, whom she refers to as Oblomov to emphasize his inability to take charge of his life, in the story Now and Then. She chronicles their downfall, blaming him for their problems as she watches him grow fat and cold towards her. ‘Outwardly, and in every other way, he’s become totally unlike the man I married.’
These short stories give the reader a full view of Kavan’s tragic existence. We suffer through with her as she must interact with humanity, which she finds incredible abhorrent, and feel trapped in a nightmarish world along with her. Of particular interest are the first story, The Old Address, which give a blunt and violent view of Kavan’s mindset which towers over all the other stories with it’s surrealistic poetry and claustrophobic tones, and the title story which presents the entire life of Julia (or is it Kavan herself?) in a jarring montage of visceral imagery ranging from her as a young child loving flowers, to failed marriages and finally to her ashes resting in a tennis trophy for her cliffside burial beside her beloved syringe. This story would have been written not long before heroin claimed the life of Kavan. With it’s dark, almost pessimistic tones and gritty descriptions, this collection of short stories makes for an incredible window into the life and mind of a fantastic author. However, one look will haunt the reader forever. The prose remains consistently powerful across each story and contains the same lucid terrors found in Ice, as both works were written around the same time. Highly recommended for any fan of Anna Kavan.
4/5
But nothing is left of Julia really, she is not there. The only occupant of the pigeon-hole is the silver cup, which can’t think or laugh or remember. There is no more Julia anywhere. Where she was there is only nothing.
Self portraits by Anna Kavan
August 31, 2024
A grim, haunting collection of delirium, addiction, and torment. It certainly won't be to everyone's taste, but anyone in the mood for some slice-of-life stories with periodic intrusions of hallucinatory weirdness from a brilliant writer need look no further. The writing is "cold" (if that makes sense) and the themes are depressing, but many of the offerings had a hypnotic, dream-like effect on me to a degree that few authors are able to achieve (Schulz, Ligotti, occasionally Robbe-Grillet and Kafka).
I may go into the individual stories eventually, but for now I'll just say that the overall feeling these gave me was one of melancholy mixed with the sensation of having a mental breakdown. Ice may be considered her masterpiece (and I agree that it is one) but, while not every story connected entirely with me, Julia and the Bazooka has several miniature masterpieces, often tackling the same themes of isolation and capturing the same deeply-felt and often irrational emotions that Kavan seemed to struggle with later in life. I like the repeated use of fast cars as symbols of escape, as if the narrator/Kavan (nearly all the stories here have the same "voice") is constantly trying to flee from her own fears and delusions.
Another author goes on my "must read everything" list, which is not a very big one.
4.0 Stars.
November 3, 2016
I read the first few stories (The Old Address, A Visit, Fog), and then skipped to Clarita and the semi-autobiographical Julia and the Bazooka. Disappointingly, the bazooka is actually a syringe, just drugs and mental illness like all the other stories. None of them were bad, but they're all the same in tone and theme: told from an internal point of view whether or not actually first person, by someone in an altered state due to mental illness or drugs. She is getting out of the institution and looking for drugs and being hit by a car. She is driving under the influence and hitting someone with her car. She is driving to look for the woman who has left her and hallucinates being pulled from the car by a python. A man or woman is like a python, crushing her so that she can't breath. Life is crushing her so that she can't breath, can't see clearly, everything is fogged. She is having sex or trying to have sex but it's not good, there is a barrier between her and the rest of the world, between her and happiness, between her perceptions and what is happening.
I think her writing is good, but I'm not particularly interested in her themes, especially dwelt on over and over with only superficial variations. I quite enjoyed her novel Ice so I may try something else by her, although really the themes are mostly the same there, only I'd say a bit subtler and with a more interesting setting. I may try one of her earlier books, written when she was still Helen Ferguson, perhaps Let Me Alone to check out the character Anna Kavan whose name the author later assumed.
I think her writing is good, but I'm not particularly interested in her themes, especially dwelt on over and over with only superficial variations. I quite enjoyed her novel Ice so I may try something else by her, although really the themes are mostly the same there, only I'd say a bit subtler and with a more interesting setting. I may try one of her earlier books, written when she was still Helen Ferguson, perhaps Let Me Alone to check out the character Anna Kavan whose name the author later assumed.
September 20, 2021
Hemen her öyküde kendimden izler bulmanın şaşkınlığıyla gülümsedim, kızdım bazen de incindim. Bazı öykülerden sonra kitabı kapatıp kendimi evden dışarı atmam gerekti. Bazı öykülerin sayfa kenarlarına öykünün kendisini el yazımla yazdım. Bir Ziyaret isimli öyküyü sanırım 10 kere falan okudum, ezberlemek zorunda kaldım. Eve gelen arkadaşlara kitabı gösterip durdum hatta bazılarına zorla öykülerden okuttum ama Bir Ziyaret’i kendim okudum. Son 3 öyküyü korkudan okuyamadım, uzun süre bu kadar seveceğim bir kitap bulamazsam diye sonraya bıraktım. Sonuç olarak bu öyküleri kendime saklama iç güdüsüyle savaşıyorum birkaç zamandır ama sonunda size söylememek Anna Kavan’a haksızlık olacak gibi geldi. O yüzden bence mutlaka okuyun, okutun :))
June 27, 2013
All I wanted then was for everything to go on as before, so that I could stay deeply asleep, and be no more than a hole in space, not here or anywhere at all, for as long as possible, preferably for ever.
I had felt like reading Anna Kavan and staying there. If there was something alive. If the skin turned outside itself beating in your hand. Something happened, there was a shift, and I didn't finish this or I Am Lazarus until this week, months later. There are people in these stories who don't get out of turning belly, they don't move when the lights come back on or off. They would look at you and ask why didn't you help me? Won't you help me? I feel a discomfort that travels up my face and burns into shame, as if I would then be afraid to see my own reflection, that they are part of me. It was the asking and I did not want to scratch and scratch that under the skin feeling, to be them, the unloved. When the why won't you help me?
She made me feel the itchy hot, the skin is turned out and flayed on a bed. Not for sleeping for being tied to. There has to be a beautiful woman in "Clarita". It is no good my wishing that there didn't have to be the beautiful woman any more. I will have to story gouge my eyes to never see this again. She has brown eyes and all the right things to say, the right looks and things to say on her arm, taking place far away and it's all right without you. You're the one who cannot stop scratching and your blood pours down your leg. You're hungry to be the pretty one with the big eyes. The hunger is too bright and I'm looking at the beauty again. They hate you and you beg. I hated me as I am them and I beg. I want to run away and there are no legs. The story gallops into a big beast to hold you down and eat. Paws on your shoulder look at me as she is scratching in the asking doorway. The beauty eats you and they are a monster. Are you the monster who eats what you see? You are a monster. I didn't want to ask the beautiful ones to help me and take me to their world. I don't want to imagine this and she has power over me. She made me feel this.
She put me in the back of the luxury car where your mother didn't love you in the world of fast car and lovers and adults with blank faces that don't see you. I don't see the big gun shoulders and double barrel engines of fast cars taking me to a world gone kaboom in an accident. What would it look like if there were the right world paints to be loved? She asks the guy of newness to take her in his car and there are other such heroes. You could paint the sky with their shoulders. You could paint the mountains and the oceans and there would be cars with people in them who take you to some place safe. You don't have to be with anyone else as long as they are always going to new places. Until it dies and you can't ask them to take you anymore. She made me feel this smoke fading away of a what if there were these kinds of heroes. Storybook heroes, with wheeled chariots. I don't want these safe faces of numbers and the past. I don't want her scarred face saying goodbye to them in the hospital and remembering a postcard of love.
Dress me in glamour of fog and crush spirits of everyone who never loved me with high heels of oblivion. Girls die under glass like they were princesses and you aren't the prince to breathe them back into life. Julia has her syringe. She has everything she never needed in a needle and it is all your fault when it doesn't beat. Yours doesn't beat either. Does anyone ever have enough love? But it is your fault. Why aren't you the prince? Won't you care? I hated myself when the patient is prophesying that her doctor love will become everyone else. If you blink it will happen. He will not be interested while you are talking. Maybe he'll say "Hmmm" and you will want to die because you are going to be alone forever. I don't want to be afraid that he is going to be like everyone else any more. I don't want to count same stripes on zebras and spots on prince leopards and tigers who can't change your stripes. I feel that way too much and I don't want to be that person. I want to do that trick where I take off my eye glasses and easy peasy lemon squeezy I can't see real or imagined "Hmmm" looks on the faces of others. I don't want to hold the hope on my tongue. I don't want to nurture butterflies in my gut anymore. I don't want to ask why people can't just be kind. Anna Kavan bloodied up monsters in her stories and made real live paper dragon faces of fog and world pretend. I like it when it feels alive in the fog so it was my fault for wanting her to make it real for me. I must have asked for the monster to get too big and remind me when I feel like one. A monster. There's a story in I am Lazarus about a man who everyone says gets himself back. That they gave him himself back. He's awake after a long sleep. They put him in the sleep and they wake him up with himself missing. Thanks to their new fangled surgery. He's got this connection to this piece of leather he's making into a belt in the work shop. I felt a longing for his longing for that bit of leather. When he stares into the workshop window as if it is the tether to all life. He can feel the leather calling to him, understanding him. That movement moved me. I don't know what they gave him and what they took but I know what he had with that bit of leather. If he curled up into a ball and cried that the leather didn't love him back I would probably be writing right now that I felt that begging and felt sick of begging. If it can't be I don't want to stay there I want to feel the movement of the monsters mouth but please not the why can't you be kind to me. I don't want to know the answer to that question. Where is it alive? Anna Kavan has power over where it is alive and it is dead. She makes it move. I could see the trains crashed in the woman's brain in the unreal police station and the unreal dead bodies and the real unreal and let none of it be true. I wish I could ask that of me and do what she did and write something real unreal because that's better than feeling sick and unkind and pleading. Pleading is the dead side of hope.
I had felt like reading Anna Kavan and staying there. If there was something alive. If the skin turned outside itself beating in your hand. Something happened, there was a shift, and I didn't finish this or I Am Lazarus until this week, months later. There are people in these stories who don't get out of turning belly, they don't move when the lights come back on or off. They would look at you and ask why didn't you help me? Won't you help me? I feel a discomfort that travels up my face and burns into shame, as if I would then be afraid to see my own reflection, that they are part of me. It was the asking and I did not want to scratch and scratch that under the skin feeling, to be them, the unloved. When the why won't you help me?
She made me feel the itchy hot, the skin is turned out and flayed on a bed. Not for sleeping for being tied to. There has to be a beautiful woman in "Clarita". It is no good my wishing that there didn't have to be the beautiful woman any more. I will have to story gouge my eyes to never see this again. She has brown eyes and all the right things to say, the right looks and things to say on her arm, taking place far away and it's all right without you. You're the one who cannot stop scratching and your blood pours down your leg. You're hungry to be the pretty one with the big eyes. The hunger is too bright and I'm looking at the beauty again. They hate you and you beg. I hated me as I am them and I beg. I want to run away and there are no legs. The story gallops into a big beast to hold you down and eat. Paws on your shoulder look at me as she is scratching in the asking doorway. The beauty eats you and they are a monster. Are you the monster who eats what you see? You are a monster. I didn't want to ask the beautiful ones to help me and take me to their world. I don't want to imagine this and she has power over me. She made me feel this.
She put me in the back of the luxury car where your mother didn't love you in the world of fast car and lovers and adults with blank faces that don't see you. I don't see the big gun shoulders and double barrel engines of fast cars taking me to a world gone kaboom in an accident. What would it look like if there were the right world paints to be loved? She asks the guy of newness to take her in his car and there are other such heroes. You could paint the sky with their shoulders. You could paint the mountains and the oceans and there would be cars with people in them who take you to some place safe. You don't have to be with anyone else as long as they are always going to new places. Until it dies and you can't ask them to take you anymore. She made me feel this smoke fading away of a what if there were these kinds of heroes. Storybook heroes, with wheeled chariots. I don't want these safe faces of numbers and the past. I don't want her scarred face saying goodbye to them in the hospital and remembering a postcard of love.
Dress me in glamour of fog and crush spirits of everyone who never loved me with high heels of oblivion. Girls die under glass like they were princesses and you aren't the prince to breathe them back into life. Julia has her syringe. She has everything she never needed in a needle and it is all your fault when it doesn't beat. Yours doesn't beat either. Does anyone ever have enough love? But it is your fault. Why aren't you the prince? Won't you care? I hated myself when the patient is prophesying that her doctor love will become everyone else. If you blink it will happen. He will not be interested while you are talking. Maybe he'll say "Hmmm" and you will want to die because you are going to be alone forever. I don't want to be afraid that he is going to be like everyone else any more. I don't want to count same stripes on zebras and spots on prince leopards and tigers who can't change your stripes. I feel that way too much and I don't want to be that person. I want to do that trick where I take off my eye glasses and easy peasy lemon squeezy I can't see real or imagined "Hmmm" looks on the faces of others. I don't want to hold the hope on my tongue. I don't want to nurture butterflies in my gut anymore. I don't want to ask why people can't just be kind. Anna Kavan bloodied up monsters in her stories and made real live paper dragon faces of fog and world pretend. I like it when it feels alive in the fog so it was my fault for wanting her to make it real for me. I must have asked for the monster to get too big and remind me when I feel like one. A monster. There's a story in I am Lazarus about a man who everyone says gets himself back. That they gave him himself back. He's awake after a long sleep. They put him in the sleep and they wake him up with himself missing. Thanks to their new fangled surgery. He's got this connection to this piece of leather he's making into a belt in the work shop. I felt a longing for his longing for that bit of leather. When he stares into the workshop window as if it is the tether to all life. He can feel the leather calling to him, understanding him. That movement moved me. I don't know what they gave him and what they took but I know what he had with that bit of leather. If he curled up into a ball and cried that the leather didn't love him back I would probably be writing right now that I felt that begging and felt sick of begging. If it can't be I don't want to stay there I want to feel the movement of the monsters mouth but please not the why can't you be kind to me. I don't want to know the answer to that question. Where is it alive? Anna Kavan has power over where it is alive and it is dead. She makes it move. I could see the trains crashed in the woman's brain in the unreal police station and the unreal dead bodies and the real unreal and let none of it be true. I wish I could ask that of me and do what she did and write something real unreal because that's better than feeling sick and unkind and pleading. Pleading is the dead side of hope.
September 15, 2024
Anna Kavan writes directly out of my head, and I read this brilliant book at exactly the right time. ‘The Old Address’ is so perfect I can barely articulate it: a six-page story that made me both laugh and cry within minutes of picking it up. ‘Fog’ is similarly brilliant; ‘World of Heroes’ absolutely heartbreaking. This is a sort of autobiography through short stories, containing some of Kavan’s most raw, personal writing at the same time as it calls back to much of her other work.
Kavan writes perfectly about drugs – the oblivious, giddy haze; the ominous gap in the high – but I don’t know that this is really just a work of ‘drug literature’, as the edition I read is described. I can’t help but think that to categorise it this way is to diminish it; while the stories that articulate Kavan’s addiction are the most powerful, they are by no means the only great thing about the book (and indeed one does not have to have been a drug addict to be moved by Kavan’s writing about depression, isolation and thwarted desire). Throughout, Kavan interweaves autobiographical details with the unreality that appears most famously in Ice. The stories are full of her favoured motifs (the divided self in ‘Out and Away’, cars as a symbol in ‘World of Heroes’ and ‘The Mercedes’...) ‘Clarita’ is a scene straight out of Who Are You?; ‘A Visit’ and ‘Among the Lost Things’ fevered fables akin to parts of Sleep Has His House. This book is like a path through both the author’s novels and her life.
Posthumous collections can be hit or miss, and are often not as good as those the author published during their lifetime. Julia and the Bazooka is the exact opposite. I’m unsure of how the collection was put together for publication, or if Kavan intended these stories to be arranged in this order, but they work astoundingly well.
If I hadn’t read Kavan before, this collection would make me think: I have to read everything this author has written. As someone who has read Kavan before, it makes me think: I should read all her books again; these stories have given me a new way to see them.
Kavan writes perfectly about drugs – the oblivious, giddy haze; the ominous gap in the high – but I don’t know that this is really just a work of ‘drug literature’, as the edition I read is described. I can’t help but think that to categorise it this way is to diminish it; while the stories that articulate Kavan’s addiction are the most powerful, they are by no means the only great thing about the book (and indeed one does not have to have been a drug addict to be moved by Kavan’s writing about depression, isolation and thwarted desire). Throughout, Kavan interweaves autobiographical details with the unreality that appears most famously in Ice. The stories are full of her favoured motifs (the divided self in ‘Out and Away’, cars as a symbol in ‘World of Heroes’ and ‘The Mercedes’...) ‘Clarita’ is a scene straight out of Who Are You?; ‘A Visit’ and ‘Among the Lost Things’ fevered fables akin to parts of Sleep Has His House. This book is like a path through both the author’s novels and her life.
Posthumous collections can be hit or miss, and are often not as good as those the author published during their lifetime. Julia and the Bazooka is the exact opposite. I’m unsure of how the collection was put together for publication, or if Kavan intended these stories to be arranged in this order, but they work astoundingly well.
If I hadn’t read Kavan before, this collection would make me think: I have to read everything this author has written. As someone who has read Kavan before, it makes me think: I should read all her books again; these stories have given me a new way to see them.
June 11, 2025
Reread June 2025. This was one of the first of Kavan's books that I read, and I don't think my thoughts on it have changed too much (that I can recall; I thought I'd written a review at the time), except maybe a feeling of deeper understanding, having since read so much of her other work. Heaviness of grief, mourning, isolation...this is perhaps the most personally telling of her books, certainly from her later period.
June 10, 2013
It is a mistake to regard these tales as drug literature. That would be asserting the methodology over the condition. There is a shadowed isolation here. The gasping protagonists can't communicate. The need to do so is often suspect. Let us be precise here, Life is terrifying but People are horrible. The pair of stories featuring Burma appear less personal and thus oddly moving.
There are motifs which repeat and reverberate. Oblomov is a recurring character here. Not Goncharov's creation but rather a human tendency. This bloated conclusion appears worse than death to Kavan's constructions. Despite the accumulated weight of this tradition, these stories did touch.
There are motifs which repeat and reverberate. Oblomov is a recurring character here. Not Goncharov's creation but rather a human tendency. This bloated conclusion appears worse than death to Kavan's constructions. Despite the accumulated weight of this tradition, these stories did touch.
July 21, 2025
3,5/5
Uyuşturucu bağımlılığı, akıl hastalığı, toplumsal dışlanma ve yalnızlık… Gerçeklik duygusu ile hayal arasında dolanmalar…
Kavan, her ne kadar uyuşturucuyu önermese ya da teşvik etmese de, bağımlılığın nasıl bir çıkmaz, nasıl bir ruhsal bozulma ve yalnızlık hali olduğunu göstersede sevemedim.
Uyuşturucu bağımlılığı, akıl hastalığı, toplumsal dışlanma ve yalnızlık… Gerçeklik duygusu ile hayal arasında dolanmalar…
Kavan, her ne kadar uyuşturucuyu önermese ya da teşvik etmese de, bağımlılığın nasıl bir çıkmaz, nasıl bir ruhsal bozulma ve yalnızlık hali olduğunu göstersede sevemedim.
August 30, 2012
Anna Kavan - my Anna Kavan - is the hallucinatory heir to Kafka, and like Kafka she conjures her most vivid effects in small spaces, sheltered from the demands of plot and characterisation. I say 'my' Anna Kavan because I'm well aware that I have focused on her short stories (these and Asylum Piece) excessively, and that beyond three fairly desultory stabs at Ice (her most famous novel) and a glance at Sleep Has His House, I know little of her work as a novelist. That said, everything that's good in Ice - the otherworldliness, the sense of place, the numbed visionary exaltation - is present in Julia and the Bazooka, but because the stories are so personal they seem to have weight where the novel has none. Take 'A Visit':
As in Ice, the setting is alien: a house 'made of palm-leaf matting, stretched over stout bamboos' amid a jungle in which 'the pattern of (the leopard's) protective spots blended so perfectly with the pattern of sun-spots through savage branches.' But the figure of the leopard, though enigmatic, is three-dimensional: though he doesn't speak he listens, and looks back at the narrator 'thoughtfully with his large, lustrous eyes'; during the day he hunts in the jungle, but never far from the house, and invariably he turns his head when he senses the narrator is watching; at one point he is on the beach, only just visible from the house, and gazing out to sea.
One night it starts raining, and next morning as the narrator is dressing the leopard leans against her for a moment, as if to suggest that she should follow him. She goes outside without a coat and follows through rain and bog until, soaked and shivering, she refuses to go any further. 'Then the beautiful head turned away, the muscles slid and bunched beneath the patterned fur, as he launched himself in a tremendous leap through the shining curtain of raindrops, and was immediately hidden from sight.' That night he doesn't come back. Over the next months as the seasons change the narrator makes a mosaic on the wall out of seashells: 'a noble animal with a fine spotted coat and a human head gazing proudly from the centre of the design'. One day, collecting shells on the beach, she sees 'out to sea, a young man coming towards the land, standing upright on the crest of a huge breaker'...
She never sees the leopard again.
Sad, huh? And maybe you wouldn't think it personal, if so many of the other stories didn't seem to connect with it, from random directions, without leopards or jungles but as if they all were dreams or fragments of dreams or inspired by dreams and reconstructed in waking life by a dreamer who sees no need to connect them to the earthly sources of their inspiration. In Asylum Piece Kavan was more straightforward; the tone, the voice, the menace was Kafka, but the journey from cold lonely London through the labyrinth of vague requests and disappointments to the asylum in mainland Europe was virtual autobiography. That book, though relentless, was powerful. But the stories in Julia... are, for all their disappointments, wonderful, and singularly hers. The heroin-addicted narrator gets in a car in the fog and, overcome with directionless rage, runs someone down at an intersection. Or she's a racing driver, or fleeing to the mountains, or back in the now snake-infested jungle, with a lover who must be thwarted or seduced. Through it all persists that flattened effect of the mosaic, but animated by strong, direct emotion, so that whatever her subject we feel we are close to the real Anna Kavan.
True, at times the flatness is overwhelming, and she'll give way to sudden, muted histrionics, as though to fight numbness by invoking grief. She's a strange author, both haunted and pragmatic, her prose at times so direct it seems artless. But, when it works, that's her strength. She's a natural. And when she's on there are few better mediums. It may not be the fever dream of 'A Country Doctor', but it glows, this writing, even from behind its wall of ice.
One hot night a leopard came into my room and lay down on the bed beside me. I was half asleep, and did not realise at first that it was a leopard. I seemed to be dreaming the sound of some large, soft-footed creature padding quietly through the house, the doors of which were wide open because of the intense heat. It was almost too dark to see the lithe, muscular shape coming into my room, treading softly on velvet paws, coming straight to the bed without hesitation, as if perfectly familiar with its position. A light spring, then warm breath on my arm, on my neck and shoulder, as the visitor sniffed me before lying down.
As in Ice, the setting is alien: a house 'made of palm-leaf matting, stretched over stout bamboos' amid a jungle in which 'the pattern of (the leopard's) protective spots blended so perfectly with the pattern of sun-spots through savage branches.' But the figure of the leopard, though enigmatic, is three-dimensional: though he doesn't speak he listens, and looks back at the narrator 'thoughtfully with his large, lustrous eyes'; during the day he hunts in the jungle, but never far from the house, and invariably he turns his head when he senses the narrator is watching; at one point he is on the beach, only just visible from the house, and gazing out to sea.
Sometimes he would suddenly come indoors, and silently go all through the house at a quick trot, unexpectedly entering one room after another, before he left again with the same mysterious abruptness. At other times he would lie just inside or outside, with his head resting on the threshold, motionless except for his watchful moving eyes, and the twitching of his sensitive nostrils in response to stimuli which my less acute senses could not perceive.
One night it starts raining, and next morning as the narrator is dressing the leopard leans against her for a moment, as if to suggest that she should follow him. She goes outside without a coat and follows through rain and bog until, soaked and shivering, she refuses to go any further. 'Then the beautiful head turned away, the muscles slid and bunched beneath the patterned fur, as he launched himself in a tremendous leap through the shining curtain of raindrops, and was immediately hidden from sight.' That night he doesn't come back. Over the next months as the seasons change the narrator makes a mosaic on the wall out of seashells: 'a noble animal with a fine spotted coat and a human head gazing proudly from the centre of the design'. One day, collecting shells on the beach, she sees 'out to sea, a young man coming towards the land, standing upright on the crest of a huge breaker'...
It was at this moment, when I was dazzled by the violent colours and the terrific glare, that the young man... reappeared like a mirage, the red of his flying cloak vibrating against the vivid emerald-green waves. This time, through a haze of shimmering brilliance, I saw that the leopard was with him, majestic and larger than life, moving as gracefully as if the waves were solid glass... I hurried towards the edge of the water, then suddenly stopped, intimidated by the colossal size of the giant rollers towering over me... Their exploding roar deafened me, I was half-blinded by the salt spray, the whole beach was a swirling, glittering dazzle, in which I lost sight of the two sea-borne shapes.
She never sees the leopard again.
But, very occasionally he still enters my dreams, which disturbs me and makes me feel restless and sad. Although I never remember the dreams when I wake, for days afterwards they seem to weigh me down with the obscure bitterness of a loss which should have been prevented, and for which I am myself to blame.
Sad, huh? And maybe you wouldn't think it personal, if so many of the other stories didn't seem to connect with it, from random directions, without leopards or jungles but as if they all were dreams or fragments of dreams or inspired by dreams and reconstructed in waking life by a dreamer who sees no need to connect them to the earthly sources of their inspiration. In Asylum Piece Kavan was more straightforward; the tone, the voice, the menace was Kafka, but the journey from cold lonely London through the labyrinth of vague requests and disappointments to the asylum in mainland Europe was virtual autobiography. That book, though relentless, was powerful. But the stories in Julia... are, for all their disappointments, wonderful, and singularly hers. The heroin-addicted narrator gets in a car in the fog and, overcome with directionless rage, runs someone down at an intersection. Or she's a racing driver, or fleeing to the mountains, or back in the now snake-infested jungle, with a lover who must be thwarted or seduced. Through it all persists that flattened effect of the mosaic, but animated by strong, direct emotion, so that whatever her subject we feel we are close to the real Anna Kavan.
True, at times the flatness is overwhelming, and she'll give way to sudden, muted histrionics, as though to fight numbness by invoking grief. She's a strange author, both haunted and pragmatic, her prose at times so direct it seems artless. But, when it works, that's her strength. She's a natural. And when she's on there are few better mediums. It may not be the fever dream of 'A Country Doctor', but it glows, this writing, even from behind its wall of ice.
March 22, 2022
''Buz'' evreninden fraktal parçacıklar - rüya gibiydi.
March 6, 2013
I must read every word this woman has written.
May 29, 2017
All I wanted then was for everything to go on as before, so that I could stay deeply asleep, and be no more than a hole in space, not here or anywhere at all, for as long as possible, preferably forever.
Anna Kavan's words: immaculate, isolated, haunt(ed/ing). Characters float through their lives, cut-off from themselves and the world, conveyed in a chilling calm which nonetheless admits the occasional description of some bizarre trauma in monolithic, ravingly vivid prose. Many highlights here, including the title entry's fragmented, dissociated life-story, the eerie automotive un-dreaming of "The High Mountains" and "Fog", the anti-Crash descriptions of "The Old Address". Actually, cars are extremely relevant here throughout -- cars and syringes as vehicles of escape, just a couple of a series of repeated motifs and scenarios that bind this volume firmly together.
I can't really think of anyone else that writes like this. The comparisons to Robbe-Grillet's detachment are apt, but there's a different sort of emotional/psychological depth underpinning her stories and imagery, which Robbe-Grillet on the other hand tends to deliberately deny the reader any glimpse of.
The headlights pounce again, the white flare of light, jabbing forward, becomes an instrument to impale, to eviscerate. Four shapes are transfixed, four white faces, frighteningly close, against a black backdrop of reeling mountains, white fish-faces staring with open mouths. The air goes colder and darker, thunder booms in the ice; ice-cold breathing down from the summits like a command. Assert the supremacy of the high mountains.
Anna Kavan seems to be very undeservedly unremembered nowadays, but posthumous work like this continues to emerge and what I've encountered so far has been incredible. (And fortunately much of her catalog isn't too hard to track down used copies of. Which you should certainly do.
The incident was unduly prolonged. Strange caterwaulings went on interminably and indistinct shapes fell about. When at last it was over, I drove on as if nothing had happened. Nothing had, really.
Collecting other notable quotes (though her every word seems notable, really) here.
(Kavan's own illustration for "A Visit".)
February 14, 2024
On beş öykünün tamamında hatta ne eksik ne fazla bir bütünlükte sarsıcı travmatik gerçeklik var. Kabul edip okursanız etkilenmemeniz mümkün değil.
“Çılgınca, tam bir cinnet halinde, bir aşağı bir yukarı koşuyorum deli gibi; kendimi manyak gibi trafiğin içine fırlatıyorum, kafamı bütün gücümle duvarlara vuruyorum. Hiçbir şey değişmiyor. Hiçbir fark yaratmıyor bu. Dehşet aynı şekilde devam ediyor. Dünyanın aşağılık ve nefret dolu olması için bana öyle görünmesi yeterliydi. Öyle de kalacak, ben onu daha uygun şartlar altında görene kadar - bu da asla demek.”
Anna Kavan yaşadıklarının sağaltımını yazarak yapıyor. Yalnızlık hissinin savruk dehşetinin etkilerini okurken aynı zamanda edebi olarak çok başarılı olduğunu hissettiriyor.
“Doktor çocukluğunda kişiliği sevgisizlikten zarar görmüş ve bu yüzden insanlarla iletişim kuramayan ya da kendini dünyada yerinde hissedemeyen Julia’ya duygudaşça davranıyor.”
Eski Adres, Sis, Bir Ziyaret, Kahramanların Dünyası, Şehirde Bir Bahçe en etkilendiğim öyküler oldu.
“Çılgınca, tam bir cinnet halinde, bir aşağı bir yukarı koşuyorum deli gibi; kendimi manyak gibi trafiğin içine fırlatıyorum, kafamı bütün gücümle duvarlara vuruyorum. Hiçbir şey değişmiyor. Hiçbir fark yaratmıyor bu. Dehşet aynı şekilde devam ediyor. Dünyanın aşağılık ve nefret dolu olması için bana öyle görünmesi yeterliydi. Öyle de kalacak, ben onu daha uygun şartlar altında görene kadar - bu da asla demek.”
Anna Kavan yaşadıklarının sağaltımını yazarak yapıyor. Yalnızlık hissinin savruk dehşetinin etkilerini okurken aynı zamanda edebi olarak çok başarılı olduğunu hissettiriyor.
“Doktor çocukluğunda kişiliği sevgisizlikten zarar görmüş ve bu yüzden insanlarla iletişim kuramayan ya da kendini dünyada yerinde hissedemeyen Julia’ya duygudaşça davranıyor.”
Eski Adres, Sis, Bir Ziyaret, Kahramanların Dünyası, Şehirde Bir Bahçe en etkilendiğim öyküler oldu.
September 8, 2021
The fifteen stories here are all, in one way or another, like rearranged fragments of an autobiography—and Anna Kavan went through more than most during her life: bad marriages, children who died, a father who leapt to his death from an ocean liner, appalling periods utterly crushed by depression, spells in psychiatric institutions, numerous suicide attempts…and a long-standing drug addiction. That last gives a completely wrong impression though; during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, attitudes to heroin were far more relaxed than they are today and Kavan herself was the very opposite of the modern picture of an addict: rather genteel in fact, always immaculately turned out and her heroin supplied for years, perfectly legally, by her psychiatrist.
Late in life she became a near-total recluse, burned all her letters, diaries and notes—and disappearing is a recurring theme in these stories. In ‘Out and Away’ for example, she describes the school to which she was offloaded as a girl by a cold and unloving mother; there she discovered the art of hiding in plain sight, of ‘disappearing’ by never speaking to anyone. Then there’s ‘Fog’, an extraordinary piece of writing describing the disconnection, the here-but-not-here feeling of unreality induced by heroin. And in ‘High in the Mountains’, where we find another way of not-being-here, we’re also confronted with what this is really all about.
Put simply, by the time these were written Kavan had long since run out of either patience or sympathy for her own species—she found the human race exasperating and well-nigh unbearable. In her final novel, Ice, this is expressed less directly; but here, in ‘High in the Mountains’, she just comes right out with it: ‘I’ve never enjoyed my life, I’ve never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be. Human beings are hateful…how can I help hating them all? Sometimes they disgust me so much that I feel I can’t go on living among them—that I must escape from the loathsome creatures swarming like maggots all over the earth.’
Shining through, there’s wonderful writing. ‘A Visit’ reads the way an Henri Rousseau painting might read, turned into words: lush jungle foliage, a dreamlike quality and a leopard silently padding in. And in ‘World of Heroes’ she found a reverse way of expressing her feelings: describing the one brief period of her life when she did truly feel part of it all, that she belonged—alongside, and as the equal of, the racing-car drivers of the 1920s who ‘risked their lives so casually’ and ‘out of their great generosity gave me the truth, paid me the compliment of not lying to me.’
Half a century after her death, my reaction to her books has been the way I bet a lot of people must have felt on ‘discovering’ Franz Kafka: how come I’d never heard of this author before? Here, but not here, even now.
Late in life she became a near-total recluse, burned all her letters, diaries and notes—and disappearing is a recurring theme in these stories. In ‘Out and Away’ for example, she describes the school to which she was offloaded as a girl by a cold and unloving mother; there she discovered the art of hiding in plain sight, of ‘disappearing’ by never speaking to anyone. Then there’s ‘Fog’, an extraordinary piece of writing describing the disconnection, the here-but-not-here feeling of unreality induced by heroin. And in ‘High in the Mountains’, where we find another way of not-being-here, we’re also confronted with what this is really all about.
Put simply, by the time these were written Kavan had long since run out of either patience or sympathy for her own species—she found the human race exasperating and well-nigh unbearable. In her final novel, Ice, this is expressed less directly; but here, in ‘High in the Mountains’, she just comes right out with it: ‘I’ve never enjoyed my life, I’ve never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be. Human beings are hateful…how can I help hating them all? Sometimes they disgust me so much that I feel I can’t go on living among them—that I must escape from the loathsome creatures swarming like maggots all over the earth.’
Shining through, there’s wonderful writing. ‘A Visit’ reads the way an Henri Rousseau painting might read, turned into words: lush jungle foliage, a dreamlike quality and a leopard silently padding in. And in ‘World of Heroes’ she found a reverse way of expressing her feelings: describing the one brief period of her life when she did truly feel part of it all, that she belonged—alongside, and as the equal of, the racing-car drivers of the 1920s who ‘risked their lives so casually’ and ‘out of their great generosity gave me the truth, paid me the compliment of not lying to me.’
Half a century after her death, my reaction to her books has been the way I bet a lot of people must have felt on ‘discovering’ Franz Kafka: how come I’d never heard of this author before? Here, but not here, even now.
April 13, 2021
"The world belongs to heartless people and to machines which can't give. Only the others, the heroes, know how to give. Out of their great generosity they gave me the truth, paid me the compliment of not lying to me. Not one of them ever told me life was worth living. They are the only people I've ever loved..." (36)
May 14, 2015
Immaculate and haunting prose. Kavan's stories function as dark meditations on disappointment, anger, and numbness, seemingly in equal measure. A few toward the end even allow a hint of cosmicism, which had sublime results. My only problem is that some of the stories weren't as engaging as the others, but that's a given with collections. Highly recommended.
February 3, 2025
The last time I read Anna Kavan was ten years ago. I was a very different person then. It was startling to realise that, over this period, Anna Kavan's soul and mine have become eerily alike, as if pressed by the same veiny leaf drenched in ink.
I don't read to seek identification. That being said, it is not without awe and hurt that one recognises oneself in the most gruesome depictions of someone else’s soul. It shouldn’t be legal to write these things, to set them free in public, and yet I am thankful that they have been set free, so that I could feel this hurt that has hurt me before and feel relieved, accompanied — at last, understood.
I don’t think Anna Kavan’s dependence on heroin is the main point of these stories. Her dependence is merely a symptom of something that lies much deeper: trauma and an unfixable disillusionment with humankind. From an early age, Anna Kavan was betrayed so many times that, throughout her life, she felt compelled to seek refuge in the most dangerous places. Peril is her cradle; she can’t help but look for love in the company of predators.
Her mind is the most beautiful hopelessness I have ever visited.
I don't read to seek identification. That being said, it is not without awe and hurt that one recognises oneself in the most gruesome depictions of someone else’s soul. It shouldn’t be legal to write these things, to set them free in public, and yet I am thankful that they have been set free, so that I could feel this hurt that has hurt me before and feel relieved, accompanied — at last, understood.
I don’t think Anna Kavan’s dependence on heroin is the main point of these stories. Her dependence is merely a symptom of something that lies much deeper: trauma and an unfixable disillusionment with humankind. From an early age, Anna Kavan was betrayed so many times that, throughout her life, she felt compelled to seek refuge in the most dangerous places. Peril is her cradle; she can’t help but look for love in the company of predators.
Her mind is the most beautiful hopelessness I have ever visited.
June 22, 2017
read these stories when i couldn't sleep at night. they are perfect for that weird in-between space; nightmarish dreamscapes. "a visit" - about a leopard - is brilliant.
January 6, 2022
Yazarın kendi hayatından kesitlerden yararlanarak kurguladığı öyküler gerçeklik duygusunu sorgulayan çok etkileyici metinler. Keşke bu öyküleri ben yazsaydım diyecek kadar yazara kendimi duygudaş hissettim. İkili ilişkilerde yaşanan aşamalar, özellikle kadınların duygusal ikilemleri, yalnızlık hissinin yoğunluğunun hayata etkileri çok başarılı bir şekilde işlenmiş.
November 6, 2024
I love this dead mentally ill British woman more than words will ever tell
May 16, 2023
okuması zor olsa da, öyküler mutlu sonla bitmese de çok sevdim bu yazarı.
November 6, 2024
Otobiyografik olması çok sarsıcı.
Anna Kavan’nın okuduğum ilk kitabı. Sessiz, ıssız, kırık dökük hikayelerle dolu bir hayatı kısa ama birbiri ile ilintili öykülerle gözler önüne seriyor. Gerçeklik ile karanlık arasındaki ince çizgide gidip gidip geliyorsunuz her birinde. Zebra-Çarpmış öyküsü kalbimi yerinden söktü. Bir de kitaba adını veren var ki, ah Julia, istediğin hayat öyle basitti ki oysa…
*Öykü severlerin kütüphanesine çok yakışır bir kitap.
Anna Kavan’nın okuduğum ilk kitabı. Sessiz, ıssız, kırık dökük hikayelerle dolu bir hayatı kısa ama birbiri ile ilintili öykülerle gözler önüne seriyor. Gerçeklik ile karanlık arasındaki ince çizgide gidip gidip geliyorsunuz her birinde. Zebra-Çarpmış öyküsü kalbimi yerinden söktü. Bir de kitaba adını veren var ki, ah Julia, istediğin hayat öyle basitti ki oysa…
*Öykü severlerin kütüphanesine çok yakışır bir kitap.
October 6, 2024
I’ve been trying to find the words to describe the experience of first having read Anna Kavan. A first time reader of Kavan will quickly come to understand her sheer talent. The revelatory experience of reading Kavan for the first time will bubble to the surface a neurotic, itchy and addictive feeling that you must, from then on, find and read every word she has written. Like Julia, you will find yourself repeatedly reaching for literature’s bazooka.
The landscape in which Kavan operates in this collection is one of nightmarish, surrealist unrealities. The characters - probably more personas than anything - that roam the town are ghostly, dummy-like and detached. They rival scenes in Kafka's work. They are at once real and unreal. You will convince yourself you can see the pores of a face only to lose focus as a hazy cloud of smoke envelopes your vision. The result is what appears to me to be one of the best, and most adept written narratives that successfully bridges the gap between the distinct worlds of sobriety and insobriety. It brings to mind what French surrealist poet Paul Éluard said, that there is another world, but it is in this one. Kavan tells us in this collection that the other world is the one occupied by persons with dependencies on substances.
Anne Carson said of reading Proust is to feel as if, for a moment in time, you have an extra unconscious. Such is the feeling of reading this collection.
The landscape in which Kavan operates in this collection is one of nightmarish, surrealist unrealities. The characters - probably more personas than anything - that roam the town are ghostly, dummy-like and detached. They rival scenes in Kafka's work. They are at once real and unreal. You will convince yourself you can see the pores of a face only to lose focus as a hazy cloud of smoke envelopes your vision. The result is what appears to me to be one of the best, and most adept written narratives that successfully bridges the gap between the distinct worlds of sobriety and insobriety. It brings to mind what French surrealist poet Paul Éluard said, that there is another world, but it is in this one. Kavan tells us in this collection that the other world is the one occupied by persons with dependencies on substances.
Anne Carson said of reading Proust is to feel as if, for a moment in time, you have an extra unconscious. Such is the feeling of reading this collection.
June 28, 2021
My second experience with Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka solidified my view that she is an unsung master, at least deserving of 10,000 times the recognition that her legacy currently enjoys. In this collection, her prose at times lapses towards normalcy, realist and relatively bland, but on balance her language is fresh and striking, her themes insidious and insistent, seeping through the page as a dreamlike mist wafts through the legs of hardwood furniture in a dully glowing room, and her voice, though often simple and matter-of-fact, is incredibly flexible and unique. She is the most relatable unrelatable person whose writing I've encountered. No one could claim to truly comprehend her tortured perspective, but her writing drifts airily over and pounds down on such distinctly human pathos and fear that even her protagonists' most idiosyncratic and apathetic moods ring tangibly in the ears of her readers. I dare say that's true--that each of the (sadly) few who (thankfully) happen across and take seriously her work will feel, in each person's own way, a palpable connection, a stitch of something distinctly human, something that speaks to the twisted, circumscribed condition of our minds in the sidereal scope of the universe.
I myself count it portentous and cosmically lucky that Will Self gave a shout out to Kavan's Ice in his introduction to Russel Hoban's amazingly awesome Riddley Walker and hope such chance encounters continue to grow Kavan's modern readership, but Peter Owen Publishers really needs to step it up and return life to her works. God damn capitalism. . . . . .
Okay--but I actually wanted to review the stories, not just ramble incoherently. Am I still up to the task?
"The Old Address", situated first in the collection, instantly stunned me with exactly what I want from Kavan (her release, the indifferent masses, then the blood, the blood!), though the substance conveys little more than promise of what's to come. While the rest of the collection does not live up to this promise, the remaining stories together strengthen the impact of Kavan's worldview and mood.
"A Visit" accelerates the wonderous, fantastic element in Kavan's storytelling and is of course another of my favourites from the collection. Reminiscent of the first part of Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing, a woman living in an unnamed jungle develops a surreal relationship with a male leopard.
"Fog" is another early hitter, as Kavan jumps into the car of a woman high on heroine driving along a country highway and disassociating from the world around her. But wait--what if the world is real? But what does it mean to be real? In any case, for each action there must be a consequence. Right?
"Experimental" is . . . decent. Actually, what, no it's not! It is indecent! It's got heroine, infidelity, and why? Well perhaps that is what Kavan is trying to figure out.
"World of Heroes" didn't stand out to me on the strength of its story but is noteworthy as offering insight into Kavan's clouded personal history, as the story appears to be largely autobiographical. Kavan's time spent with these racing drivers clearly influenced her perspective and trajectory, perhaps to a momentous extent.
"The Mercedes" is the first of three stress story regarding Kavan's obsessional relationship with Dr. Karl Bluth. Yeah, it's unsettling, but it didn't affect me as much as some of the others.
"Clarita" is a strange one, rife with Kavan's insecurity, obsessiveness, and longing. Clarita is beautiful, and the narrator is --um--unsightly, covered head to toe in a rash of lumps and weals. She is obsessed with Clarita's perceived lover, and pursues them to a party with a hallucinogenic conclusion.
"Out and Away" is further telling with regard to Kavan's lonely perspective, her remoteness, her drifting consciousness and pervasive sense of unreality. These feelings are conveyed simply enough, by a high school narrator who slips further and further into blank daydreams, intentionally distancing herself from those pesky others who appear in her day to day life, relying on her "cleverer" twin sister to run the show.
"Now and Then" is a somewhat gimmicky chronical of a marriage gone hopelessly sour, shifting back and forth with statements like "then things were easy and warm" and "now they are dark and horrid". Like many of the stories in this collection, this one is a painful autobiography of sorts, as Kavan draws on her feelings from her relationship with the alcoholic artist Stuart Edmonds.
"High in the Mountains" is another on the more disturbing side, as the high narrator veers her automobile recklessly out of the city, engaging in sociopathic broodings and seeking twisted comfort in the "clean, cold, hard, detached" mountains beyond civilization. The narrator pits herself against "life and people, on the side of otherness and indifference, isolation, the mineral beauty of the non-human world." Oh, Kavan. As a side note, the story relates how Kavan was introduced to heroine, that is, by a tennis coach who shockingly insisted that the drug would improve her serve--talk about the roaring '20s!
"Among the Lost Things" left me with an ominous, persistent afterimage, more potent than many other mental images that I retained from the collection. An omnipresent, omnipotent star, a pitch-black room, a sardonic male antagonist . . . and humanity lost. I find Kavan excels in this kind of metaphysical narrative, thrusting down on the reader which much more power, in comparison to her more realist works.
"The Zebra-Struck" contains some cool metaphysical musing, with notions on probability and the stars, as Kavan tries to make sense of her connection with Dr. Bluth. The longest story in the collection, Kavan spreads bare her deeply obsessive nature.
"A Town Garden" is an example of Kavan's disposition verging on whiny and spoiled, although the surreal element in this story hits on Kavan's better vein: again, I believe her writing excels much more in its surrealism and dreamlike qualities than when it focuses on more realist descriptions.
"Obsessional" is another throwback to Dr. Bluth, a bald reflection on Kavan's weird fixation and need.
"Julia and the Bazooka" was the most "damn, this is her"-feeling story in the collection, affecting the reader like a twisted journal entry by a misguided girl. Misguided by the world, by herself, who can tell? For certain, the world is not entirely cruel, arbitrary, and to blame.
I myself count it portentous and cosmically lucky that Will Self gave a shout out to Kavan's Ice in his introduction to Russel Hoban's amazingly awesome Riddley Walker and hope such chance encounters continue to grow Kavan's modern readership, but Peter Owen Publishers really needs to step it up and return life to her works. God damn capitalism. . . . . .
Okay--but I actually wanted to review the stories, not just ramble incoherently. Am I still up to the task?
"The Old Address", situated first in the collection, instantly stunned me with exactly what I want from Kavan (her release, the indifferent masses, then the blood, the blood!), though the substance conveys little more than promise of what's to come. While the rest of the collection does not live up to this promise, the remaining stories together strengthen the impact of Kavan's worldview and mood.
"A Visit" accelerates the wonderous, fantastic element in Kavan's storytelling and is of course another of my favourites from the collection. Reminiscent of the first part of Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing, a woman living in an unnamed jungle develops a surreal relationship with a male leopard.
"Fog" is another early hitter, as Kavan jumps into the car of a woman high on heroine driving along a country highway and disassociating from the world around her. But wait--what if the world is real? But what does it mean to be real? In any case, for each action there must be a consequence. Right?
"Experimental" is . . . decent. Actually, what, no it's not! It is indecent! It's got heroine, infidelity, and why? Well perhaps that is what Kavan is trying to figure out.
"World of Heroes" didn't stand out to me on the strength of its story but is noteworthy as offering insight into Kavan's clouded personal history, as the story appears to be largely autobiographical. Kavan's time spent with these racing drivers clearly influenced her perspective and trajectory, perhaps to a momentous extent.
"The Mercedes" is the first of three stress story regarding Kavan's obsessional relationship with Dr. Karl Bluth. Yeah, it's unsettling, but it didn't affect me as much as some of the others.
"Clarita" is a strange one, rife with Kavan's insecurity, obsessiveness, and longing. Clarita is beautiful, and the narrator is --um--unsightly, covered head to toe in a rash of lumps and weals. She is obsessed with Clarita's perceived lover, and pursues them to a party with a hallucinogenic conclusion.
"Out and Away" is further telling with regard to Kavan's lonely perspective, her remoteness, her drifting consciousness and pervasive sense of unreality. These feelings are conveyed simply enough, by a high school narrator who slips further and further into blank daydreams, intentionally distancing herself from those pesky others who appear in her day to day life, relying on her "cleverer" twin sister to run the show.
"Now and Then" is a somewhat gimmicky chronical of a marriage gone hopelessly sour, shifting back and forth with statements like "then things were easy and warm" and "now they are dark and horrid". Like many of the stories in this collection, this one is a painful autobiography of sorts, as Kavan draws on her feelings from her relationship with the alcoholic artist Stuart Edmonds.
"High in the Mountains" is another on the more disturbing side, as the high narrator veers her automobile recklessly out of the city, engaging in sociopathic broodings and seeking twisted comfort in the "clean, cold, hard, detached" mountains beyond civilization. The narrator pits herself against "life and people, on the side of otherness and indifference, isolation, the mineral beauty of the non-human world." Oh, Kavan. As a side note, the story relates how Kavan was introduced to heroine, that is, by a tennis coach who shockingly insisted that the drug would improve her serve--talk about the roaring '20s!
"Among the Lost Things" left me with an ominous, persistent afterimage, more potent than many other mental images that I retained from the collection. An omnipresent, omnipotent star, a pitch-black room, a sardonic male antagonist . . . and humanity lost. I find Kavan excels in this kind of metaphysical narrative, thrusting down on the reader which much more power, in comparison to her more realist works.
"The Zebra-Struck" contains some cool metaphysical musing, with notions on probability and the stars, as Kavan tries to make sense of her connection with Dr. Bluth. The longest story in the collection, Kavan spreads bare her deeply obsessive nature.
"A Town Garden" is an example of Kavan's disposition verging on whiny and spoiled, although the surreal element in this story hits on Kavan's better vein: again, I believe her writing excels much more in its surrealism and dreamlike qualities than when it focuses on more realist descriptions.
"Obsessional" is another throwback to Dr. Bluth, a bald reflection on Kavan's weird fixation and need.
"Julia and the Bazooka" was the most "damn, this is her"-feeling story in the collection, affecting the reader like a twisted journal entry by a misguided girl. Misguided by the world, by herself, who can tell? For certain, the world is not entirely cruel, arbitrary, and to blame.
November 26, 2021
Belli bir okuma disiplini, alışkanlığı sonrasında gelişen bir kas gibi size en yabancı gelebilecek metni, yazarı yavaş yavaş çözümleyip okunurluğuna, o atmosfere alışmak. En azından bende sayfalarla beraber o ritim artıyor. Fakat Anna Kavan ile (ki "Buz"u yakın zamanda okumama rağmen) resmen duvara tosladım. Üstadımız Selahattin Özpalabıyıklar çevirisi üstelik. Fakat kitap bittiğinde net olarak Anna Kavan'ı eşsiz, ünik bir yazar yapan şeyin de tam olarak bu (alışılmışın dışındaki zihni ve yazımı) olduğunu iyice anladım. Başımın dönmesi, bazı yerleri tekrar tekrar okumak yararsızdı çünkü zihnindeydim, bunu başarmak, bunu okura geçirmek olağanüstü bir şey. Zorlu ama değecek, farklılık yaratacak bir kitap.
July 4, 2021
The air goes colder and darker, thunder booms in the ice; ice-cold breathing down from the summits like a command. Assert the supremacy of the high mountains.
July 19, 2025
Suberb
October 3, 2014
My rating likely reflects my personal aesthetics. This book is a collection of well written stories, most of which are of the "slice of life" type, the kind which appears in literary journals published by university presses. For example, in the story "Now and Then", the narrator compares her husband before they got married, to after they got married. Before marriage, he was a stud. After marriage, he became a fat, lazy slob.
I'm not a big fan of that type of fiction. My aesthetics could be described as favoring well written genre fiction, and literary fiction with genre elements.
But Anna Kavan sometimes channels Kafka, like in her other story collection _Asylum Piece_. The fiction in this book I liked:
"Fog"
A creepy story, which come to think of it would be not out of place in a horror anthology. A woman is driving through a fog, and sees faces like Japanese dragon-masks, and bodies like dummies. Later, the narrator is questioned by the authorities because she might have run over somebody when she was driving through the fog.
"Among the Lost Things"
Clearly science fiction. The narrator refers to a celestial object which she calls a star, but it may well be a comet or other travelling body. The radiations of this star "have changed biological patterns, transmuted the immutable, evolved strange variations." The narrator, too, is undergoing biological changes.
I'm not a big fan of that type of fiction. My aesthetics could be described as favoring well written genre fiction, and literary fiction with genre elements.
But Anna Kavan sometimes channels Kafka, like in her other story collection _Asylum Piece_. The fiction in this book I liked:
"Fog"
A creepy story, which come to think of it would be not out of place in a horror anthology. A woman is driving through a fog, and sees faces like Japanese dragon-masks, and bodies like dummies. Later, the narrator is questioned by the authorities because she might have run over somebody when she was driving through the fog.
"Among the Lost Things"
Clearly science fiction. The narrator refers to a celestial object which she calls a star, but it may well be a comet or other travelling body. The radiations of this star "have changed biological patterns, transmuted the immutable, evolved strange variations." The narrator, too, is undergoing biological changes.
August 2, 2014
A work of surreal, nightmarish visions, these heavily autobiographical stories mostly deal with Kavan’s own depression and drug use. What’s incredible is the sheer insight she has into her own condition. Each of her narrators struggles to cope with their inevitable solitude and isolation. They long to be accepted and to be loved; yet they can’t because they are unable to connect with other people and many times believe that society is a sham. To them, other people are often only masks or illusions pretending to be real people. When Kavan’s narrators occasionally find acceptance within a social group or in a relationship, it is only fleeting. For me, this was the greatest tragedy of many of the stories. The source of love and acceptance inevitably lets the narrator down or the narrator cannot reconcile herself to human companionship and life again becomes unbearable. All of the stories are worth reading.
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