What do you think?
Rate this book
Guilty
Set in an unspecified but eerily familiar time and landscape, this is the story of Mark, a protagonist who struggles against the machinations of a hostile society and bureaucracy. Suffering at first from the persecution of his father as a conscientious objector, his life quickly comes under the control of the Machiavellian Mr. Spector, an influential government minister who arranges Mark's education, later employment, and even accommodation. It is when Mark tries to break free from Spector's influence that his life begins to unravel.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
7 people are currently reading
280 people want to read
About the author
Anna Kavan
39 books478 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
July 3, 2017
Anna Kavan's so-called 'lost' novel straddles stylistic and thematic lines between her early 'home counties' novels and her post-WWII surrealist dreamscapes. In this respect, the writing here bears some similarity to that found in the short fiction collection I Am Lazarus. In Guilty, we follow the life trajectory of first-person narrator Mark from childhood to early adulthood. From early on, Mark lives in two different worlds: one is relatively normal and free of distortion, while the other is dark and fraught with menace. Other people in his life look and act differently according to which world he is dwelling in. He in turn reacts to them based on whether he is feeling unreal or not, often shifting from a state of paranoia and anxiety to one of relief and gratitude, usually in response to stimuli from another's tone or mood. All of this is clearly evident to the reader thanks to Mark's explication of his shifts. From this standpoint, Kavan offers a measured, lucid explanation of what often occurs in her later novels, which provide no such road markers. Over time Mark experiments with his shifting reality to the point where he can will himself across the border between reality and unreality, though his control remains tenuous and the unwilling shifts still continue throughout his life. The novel is heavy with foreboding—the plot advancing forward at an unrelenting pace toward some obscure dark blot in the distance. It explores many of Kavan's familiar themes: the child as pawn between authoritarian adults; control and domination in relationships; the frustration of confronting a sinister, faceless bureaucracy; extreme personal alienation; paranoia and its destruction of love. While it's not among her finest work, this highly readable novel is still solidly Anna Kavan and as such should appeal to her most devoted readers.
April 23, 2011
Mark's father was a former soldier who had fought in two wars. He came home a minor hero but then publicly declared himself a pacifist. For this, he was ostracized and was forced to leave his family (Mark and his mother) to look for a new place for them to live in where his opinions against war can be received with tolerance.
While Mark's father was away, their frequent visitor was Mr Spector (no dot for the "Mr"), an old friend of his father. As this novel is in the first-person narrative, by Mark himself, starting at that time he was still a young boy, there could only be a hint that his mother and Mr Spector had become lovers while his father was away. Or had at least been in a very serious flirting stage. Mr Spector became Mark's surrogate faather with whom he had mixed feelings of love and hate, respect and fear. It was Mr Spector who made a school, which hated Mark's father's pacifist ideas, accept Mark as a student where he was coldly treated even by his fellow students.
Anna Kavan got an extra star from me for this name "Mr Spector." I realized that no English name could be more sinister-sounding than this as it brings to the ear similar horrific-sounding words like Inspector (trouble with the law), Spectre (haunting), Spectral (ghostly), Spectrum (confusing), Expectorate (rejection) and Spector (Phil, bad music).
Mark saw horror in everything but seemed to like it. He was intelligent, had a knack for writing and the arts, but hated chess. In the school where he was admitted into, after some vague arm-twisting done to the school officials by this enigmatic Mr Spector, there was a topiary chess-garden where trees were cut in the shape of chess pieces. A guy like me, or even just a normal boy, would be jumping up and down with a fantasy garden like this, considering it perhaps as the 9th wonder of the world. But not Mark. He called this garden malignant. His own description (and note how well he wrote to capture the gloom he saw in this innocent-looking place):
"No flowers grew here among the rows of tall evergreens, immensely old and cunningly clipped in the shapes of chessmen, by which I'd been so impressed when I first arrived. Even now, after years have passed, their weird aspect, hard and solid-looking as if carved out of malachite, is the thing I remember most clearly about the school. Only one man in the whole country was expert enough to give them their yearly trim, and his family had held the hereditary office since time immemorial. When the sun was high, these arborial curiosities could resemble a grotesque company of medieval giants, with their attendant dwarf-shadows. Or an army of green invaders from an alien planet sometimes seemed to be marching in ordered formation across the lawn, where only masters and prefects were allowed to tread. All their transformations, however, as my first glimpse had showed me, possessed the common quality of malice, which infected the air around them, as if, throughout the centuries of their long lives, they'd been accumulating contempt and bitterness for their human creators, which found expression in this emanation.
"x x x
"Outside there, I could see the chessmen, at their most mocking, crowd one behind the other to peer in derisively at me, as though all the centuries-old malice, which should have been distributed over the whole human race, had been concentrated on me alone."
Eventually he finished his studies and had to leave that school. But, on his fianl day there, he wasn't finished with the chess garden yet:
"I seemed to get the better of the chessmen, too, in the end. When I looked at them for the last time from Mr Spector's big car, they at first appeared utterly indifferent to my departure, standing stiff and unmoving in sombre rows. Then suddenly, on this bleak and blustery day, the wind set them confabulating; putting their black heads together, they gobbled and gabbled in growing excitement and finally started to dance up and down, as if in rage at being rooted there and unable to follow me, except with their clamorous mocking voices, whistling derisively after me as we drove away."
The book's blurbs use the word "Kafakaesque" (I thought it's "Kafkaesque," after all Franz's surname was "Kafka" and not "Kafaka," but maybe even the blurbs would like to have a mysterious, foreboding tone themselves). Indeed, this novel is so oppressive, nightmarish and so black that it was almost always midnight. And if both Franz Kafka and his predecessor Heinrich von Kleist had their own Castles, Mark here had his...Housing Bureau. And if you think this sounds ridiculous (and the basic plot too, if I'll give it to you here), then you haven't seen how Mark writes about the world HE lives in--
"We all of us construct our own worlds from what is within us, and this is the obvious reason why it's so vitally important to know what is there."
Read this.
While Mark's father was away, their frequent visitor was Mr Spector (no dot for the "Mr"), an old friend of his father. As this novel is in the first-person narrative, by Mark himself, starting at that time he was still a young boy, there could only be a hint that his mother and Mr Spector had become lovers while his father was away. Or had at least been in a very serious flirting stage. Mr Spector became Mark's surrogate faather with whom he had mixed feelings of love and hate, respect and fear. It was Mr Spector who made a school, which hated Mark's father's pacifist ideas, accept Mark as a student where he was coldly treated even by his fellow students.
Anna Kavan got an extra star from me for this name "Mr Spector." I realized that no English name could be more sinister-sounding than this as it brings to the ear similar horrific-sounding words like Inspector (trouble with the law), Spectre (haunting), Spectral (ghostly), Spectrum (confusing), Expectorate (rejection) and Spector (Phil, bad music).
Mark saw horror in everything but seemed to like it. He was intelligent, had a knack for writing and the arts, but hated chess. In the school where he was admitted into, after some vague arm-twisting done to the school officials by this enigmatic Mr Spector, there was a topiary chess-garden where trees were cut in the shape of chess pieces. A guy like me, or even just a normal boy, would be jumping up and down with a fantasy garden like this, considering it perhaps as the 9th wonder of the world. But not Mark. He called this garden malignant. His own description (and note how well he wrote to capture the gloom he saw in this innocent-looking place):
"No flowers grew here among the rows of tall evergreens, immensely old and cunningly clipped in the shapes of chessmen, by which I'd been so impressed when I first arrived. Even now, after years have passed, their weird aspect, hard and solid-looking as if carved out of malachite, is the thing I remember most clearly about the school. Only one man in the whole country was expert enough to give them their yearly trim, and his family had held the hereditary office since time immemorial. When the sun was high, these arborial curiosities could resemble a grotesque company of medieval giants, with their attendant dwarf-shadows. Or an army of green invaders from an alien planet sometimes seemed to be marching in ordered formation across the lawn, where only masters and prefects were allowed to tread. All their transformations, however, as my first glimpse had showed me, possessed the common quality of malice, which infected the air around them, as if, throughout the centuries of their long lives, they'd been accumulating contempt and bitterness for their human creators, which found expression in this emanation.
"x x x
"Outside there, I could see the chessmen, at their most mocking, crowd one behind the other to peer in derisively at me, as though all the centuries-old malice, which should have been distributed over the whole human race, had been concentrated on me alone."
Eventually he finished his studies and had to leave that school. But, on his fianl day there, he wasn't finished with the chess garden yet:
"I seemed to get the better of the chessmen, too, in the end. When I looked at them for the last time from Mr Spector's big car, they at first appeared utterly indifferent to my departure, standing stiff and unmoving in sombre rows. Then suddenly, on this bleak and blustery day, the wind set them confabulating; putting their black heads together, they gobbled and gabbled in growing excitement and finally started to dance up and down, as if in rage at being rooted there and unable to follow me, except with their clamorous mocking voices, whistling derisively after me as we drove away."
The book's blurbs use the word "Kafakaesque" (I thought it's "Kafkaesque," after all Franz's surname was "Kafka" and not "Kafaka," but maybe even the blurbs would like to have a mysterious, foreboding tone themselves). Indeed, this novel is so oppressive, nightmarish and so black that it was almost always midnight. And if both Franz Kafka and his predecessor Heinrich von Kleist had their own Castles, Mark here had his...Housing Bureau. And if you think this sounds ridiculous (and the basic plot too, if I'll give it to you here), then you haven't seen how Mark writes about the world HE lives in--
"We all of us construct our own worlds from what is within us, and this is the obvious reason why it's so vitally important to know what is there."
Read this.
October 5, 2012
Stifling anxiety dreams, isolation, and oppressive self-destructive reflex. Particularly at the moment, exhausting, but then it actually manages a level of self-reflection and accountability that seems rare among the cycle of Kavan's doom-mantras of which this seems to have been a part, which almost suggests a kind of future-resolution. Though, only published in 2007, no one seems able to determine exactly when this ambiguously near-future tale seems to have been constructed.
July 15, 2017
"What crime I'd committed, I didn't know; nor did this matter, since I knew I was guilty, and guilt itself was my crime. The shades of the prison house already enclosed me. There was no hope. I was being dragged deeper into some weird cavernous darkness, lit only by glow-worm glimmers of greenish light. Never again, I thought despairingly, should I see the sun."
October 29, 2017
Kavan’s unsettling, detached and slightly Kafka-esque style permeates the novel with a hypnagogic atmosphere, as the narrator, Mark, feels increasingly trapped in a world which he feels is hostile to his existence. Diffident and suspicious, Mark resides in an unnamed country, initially with his parents, who come across as cold and glib and far removed from Mark’s juvenile concerns; some salvation comes via the charming and spectral Mr Spector, a powerful man who is friends with Mark’s parents and is the first person who Mark views as taking him seriously, as caring for him and his views. In the eyes of the narrator, his parents scarce exist as people, instead they are inherently two-dimensional, his father, vaguely ambivalent an exiled from the anonymous country in which “Guilty” is set for the crime of pacifism and his mother, who seems to view Mark as an irritant, a minor inconvenience in her life, though we never really gain much of an idea as to what her (or any other character’s) life really consists of. Instead we view the world via the narrow, paranoid prism of Mark’s eyes; from his fiancee Carla, to the sinister motley of school-boys who (in the eyes of Mark) despise him, the world and characters are essentially flat, from the incompetent Housing Bureau to the emotionally suffocating school, there is something slightly lacking in the novel, the delirious dream-scapes conjured up by Kavan fail to captivate the reader, or to drew them in, instead the reader is left vaguely indifferent about the world Mark inhabits, the novel reads like a poor, second-rate imitation of Kafka, choc full of cliches and hackneyed characters and lacking in the sense of suffocation which Kafka was able to create in his stories. In creating such an ambivalent character, Kavan failed to create a world which was convincing or even interesting, that is not to say that “Guilty” is a terrible novel, just a mediocre one.
August 27, 2018
"I wonder whether I've made it sound too easy this course I'm taking. Anybody who's ever attempted it to do it will know that it's never easy to start life again, especially with very little money and without friends. Eternal regret is the price I must pay for the idyllic companionship I have known and lost. Now I'm more alone than I've ever been, not only because I no longer have any friends but because I know that, however closely another life may impinge upon mine, ultimately I exist in impenetrable isolation.
So I come to the end of my writing. I've often thought it was of no value, my ideas of no more significance than the aimless circling of flies in an empty room. And, if anyone else ever reads these words, he'll probably endorse this opinion, saying these are trivial personal matters that tell him nothing he didn't already know.
To such a person I must admit that I deserve his criticism, for communication was not my primary object. But my egotism seems justified by the understanding, to which the writing has led, of things that are of supreme importance to me, though possibly they are incommunicable." (189)
July 28, 2020
A very unsettling and unpleasant read for me. Am I influenced by the knowledge of Kavan's biography, to feel uneasy about the unsettling ways her writing works on me? Am I thinking about her addiction when I read along and find myself thinking that she isn't completely in control of her own material?
A lot of writers/books I love are more disturbing than Kavan's novels, but with those others I frequently have the feeling, maybe because of my own ignorance of these writers, that they're in control of their material, and that they're deliberately creating literary effects of dread and disorientation, whereas with Kavan I feel like I'm having an encounter with mental illness as I read.
A lot of writers/books I love are more disturbing than Kavan's novels, but with those others I frequently have the feeling, maybe because of my own ignorance of these writers, that they're in control of their material, and that they're deliberately creating literary effects of dread and disorientation, whereas with Kavan I feel like I'm having an encounter with mental illness as I read.
February 18, 2017
Kavan is a hidden gem; she deserves to be much more well-known than she is. Even this, which is not rated as one of her best and stayed unpublished for decades, is a beautiful insight into anxiety and fear and an engaging and compelling portrayal of a world of sweeping high-up decisions and arcane rules and how they play havoc with one man. Fully deserves to be thought of as a contemporary of Kafka, as some authors and critics suggest.
July 22, 2013
Lesser Kavan, but still solid. Lately Kafkaesque bureaucracy has been making me feel very claustrophobic, either more than usual or it is hitting me for the first time.
November 26, 2016
Residual guilt that roots deep in childhood & suffocates you for ever after. The never-good-enough-i-don't-deserve-anything that Kavan captures so perfectly always. The personification of exterior objects that mirrors the interior mind-- the garden shrubs shaped into unrelenting chess figures & black, hard, shiny cars. I don't know how Kavan lived with her own mind-- always haunted / hunted without rest.
This passage here:
"Though I'm so eager to meet this being composed of all my past selves, the prospect frightens me, too. I'm afraid of the face I and other people may have given him or, worst of all, that he may be faceless. Once in imagination - or was it in reality? - I felt my inmost self dissolve and fall away from me. And lately I've developed a foolish trick of looking the other way when I pass a mirror, in case there should be no reflection there. To find that the personality I've been building up all my life was without a face would be the most appalling of all possible discoveries.
I'm quite prepared to meet the face of a criminal. I've known guilt all my life and been shunned and hated for it by my fellow creatures. In a sense, guilt has evolved me; without it, neither I nor my other self could exist. Not only is that self the criminal but the victim as well, the judge and, ultimately, the executioner. I can accept my guilt now that I recognize it as my own creation. We all of us construct our own world from what is within us, and this is the obvious reason why it's so vitally important to know what is there."
This passage here:
"Though I'm so eager to meet this being composed of all my past selves, the prospect frightens me, too. I'm afraid of the face I and other people may have given him or, worst of all, that he may be faceless. Once in imagination - or was it in reality? - I felt my inmost self dissolve and fall away from me. And lately I've developed a foolish trick of looking the other way when I pass a mirror, in case there should be no reflection there. To find that the personality I've been building up all my life was without a face would be the most appalling of all possible discoveries.
I'm quite prepared to meet the face of a criminal. I've known guilt all my life and been shunned and hated for it by my fellow creatures. In a sense, guilt has evolved me; without it, neither I nor my other self could exist. Not only is that self the criminal but the victim as well, the judge and, ultimately, the executioner. I can accept my guilt now that I recognize it as my own creation. We all of us construct our own world from what is within us, and this is the obvious reason why it's so vitally important to know what is there."
August 1, 2019
An unloved child lives in a world of isolation and fear. Children often have a vague guilt that they could be the source of their parent's coldness. Naturally, the child's sane, rational and loving mind/soul know the parent's behavior is insane but since nature abhors a vacuum, some reason - equally irrational of course - must be found to explain the situation. "I'm a child and seemingly know very little about life, my parents seemingly know much more, therefore they must be right." The situation causes a clash between instinctual and learned behavior, the instinct says one thing while the mind, full of the fears of inadequacy about adult complexities and rote knowledge, sacrifices itself and its intellectual/emotional freedom for the comfort of parental safety; these fears are some of the origins of endemic brainwashing and ignorance, where masses of people, throughout history, have been controlled to perform atrocities and live in slavery. I use the language of infection because it is something that can be healed, or ameliorated. It is the rare and special child that can disassociate from the situation and the emotional ties and calmly say, " My parents are insane, everything about their lives is wrong; I must bide my time and hope for the best until I can leave." Essential reading.
March 30, 2014
Only published in 2007, this novel seems to have been written in the late 40s. It's unusual for Kavan in that it is written as an undivided 1st person narrative recounted by a young male. It starts when the infant boy witnesses the trauma of his war hero father returning home and shoving his uniform and medals in the dustbin, after declaring himself to be a pacifist. After that the hero is secured a place at a public school by a mysterious, highly-connected benefactor Mr Spector. The story changes abruptly when an atomic war begins and ends in days, dislocating society and killing thousands, including Mark's parents. After that he moves to a reconstructing city, very similar to the portrayal of wartime London in the "I Am Lazarus" stories. The postwar scene is a land of petty bureaucracy and shortages and our hero is increasingly guilty and uneasy for the privileges still bestowed on him, leading to a final hallucinatory breakdown. Although there are the lapses in to flat writing that occur in Kavan's books, this time it fits with the disconnected, distanced consciousness at the heart of this world, living a life filled with a sense of overwhelming guilt at the unchosen conditions of its own existence.
Read
September 8, 2016First it was brilliant 'Ice', now it's 'Guilty'. And again this feeling that there was a person who described my own thoughts with such an insight and wrote about the incommunicable before I was even born (but I'd better not). Gotta read more of her books before transposing myself into nonexistence.
March 5, 2008
Ultimately disappointing
June 14, 2009
She reminds me of Hermann Hesse, the way she expresses the inner workings of thoughts and feelings.
May 29, 2015
This book is just not very good to be honest but it had some nice scenes
March 20, 2016
some wounds must be received.
March 7, 2023
An odd, spiraling book about guilt and insanity with an unreliable (and unlikable) narrator who loses himself in his guilt and his inaction and decides, like Hamlet, on a sort of self-destruction: but it ends with the hope of self-discovery, unlike Shakespeare's bleakly self-destructive creature. It reminded me heavily of Dostoevsky at parts, particularly the self-loathing. An interesting book all in all, but not exactly something you read for improving your spirits.
Read
November 8, 2023Same feeling as kafka kinda bleak childhood seems normal but everything kinda twisted and depressing
August 18, 2023
This strikes me as the most Kafkaesque Kavan I've read, and I've read most of her work. But then in a way it's not Kafkaesque: we go deeper into the minds of Kavan's characters, emotions weigh heavier on the protagonist, and the protagonist is consistently delayed, foiled, put off not because he is a helpless object of an arbitrary system (as in Kafka's work) but rather because of his own ill choices. Kavan manifests the unsettling helplessness, the absurd circuity, of Kafka's writing, but she refocuses the blame on the psychology of the hero. Kafka arguably does this to an extent, but for the most part ineluctable external forces are the agent of his heroes' problems.
For example, take this reflection of the hero in Guilty: "Why had I rushed away like that? What had happened? I asked myself, with an uneasy feeling that I'd acted foolishly. Nothing, apparently, had happened except in my head, where momentarily that larger-than-life form again loomed up, the personification of some inescapable threat at the heart of an old dream I couldn't entirely forget but refused to remember, concentrating instead on the real incident." (p. 158) The hero had snuck away from his love interest at a pivotal moment and later reflects that his mind had been clouded by "obscure dream-like notions" and that he had clearly behaved badly.
Or take another instance, when the hero appears about to achieve a great victory long struggled for through convoluted bureaucratic channels, only to decide that the apparent positive response from the official is a sham. He refuses to accept what very much appears like success in his case, as though K. were offered a pardon for his crime if only he would read and sign a brief release form but K. refused to even read the form for fear of a prank by the officials. Such an episode would rob K. of his seeming righteousness in the matter, whereas in Guilty we indeed see that the hero has lost his wits and, as readers, are forced to doubt that he is being manipulated by anyone but himself.
Finally, consider the hero's reflection towards the end of the novel: "I'd never been anything but 'in transit' through my life. In a sudden, complete, instantaneous vision, I saw it as a train and myself as a passenger always changing compartments, moving on to another before getting to know the self left behind in the last carriage. I'd always presumed these old outgrown personalities had ceased to exist when I discarded them, possibly lingering on for a while as remembered ghosts of what they had been, till they finally sank into oblivion, dead and forgotten. Now, for the first time, I understood that it wasn't possible to discard any part of myself. Seeing all these unknown selves sitting where I'd left them, staring out of the windows through the eyes I'd once shared, I was struck most forcibly by the fact that I hadn't got rid of them after all; they were still in the same train with me and always would be as long as I travelled in it. This meant that at any time any one of them was liable to spring out of his place, chase me along the corridor to my present compartment and there take possession of me, temporarily directing my actions and supplanting my current self." (p. 185)
I don't know about you, but to me this sort of contemplation on the self is not very Kafkaesque -- not very at all. Kavan was openly indebted to the Czech master, but through her characters' profound inward expressions of despair and dreaminess, their self-reflection and psychotic breaks, she brings forward a question that surely lurks beneath the surface of Kafka's work but never openly rears its head: am I to blame?
For example, take this reflection of the hero in Guilty: "Why had I rushed away like that? What had happened? I asked myself, with an uneasy feeling that I'd acted foolishly. Nothing, apparently, had happened except in my head, where momentarily that larger-than-life form again loomed up, the personification of some inescapable threat at the heart of an old dream I couldn't entirely forget but refused to remember, concentrating instead on the real incident." (p. 158) The hero had snuck away from his love interest at a pivotal moment and later reflects that his mind had been clouded by "obscure dream-like notions" and that he had clearly behaved badly.
Or take another instance, when the hero appears about to achieve a great victory long struggled for through convoluted bureaucratic channels, only to decide that the apparent positive response from the official is a sham. He refuses to accept what very much appears like success in his case, as though K. were offered a pardon for his crime if only he would read and sign a brief release form but K. refused to even read the form for fear of a prank by the officials. Such an episode would rob K. of his seeming righteousness in the matter, whereas in Guilty we indeed see that the hero has lost his wits and, as readers, are forced to doubt that he is being manipulated by anyone but himself.
Finally, consider the hero's reflection towards the end of the novel: "I'd never been anything but 'in transit' through my life. In a sudden, complete, instantaneous vision, I saw it as a train and myself as a passenger always changing compartments, moving on to another before getting to know the self left behind in the last carriage. I'd always presumed these old outgrown personalities had ceased to exist when I discarded them, possibly lingering on for a while as remembered ghosts of what they had been, till they finally sank into oblivion, dead and forgotten. Now, for the first time, I understood that it wasn't possible to discard any part of myself. Seeing all these unknown selves sitting where I'd left them, staring out of the windows through the eyes I'd once shared, I was struck most forcibly by the fact that I hadn't got rid of them after all; they were still in the same train with me and always would be as long as I travelled in it. This meant that at any time any one of them was liable to spring out of his place, chase me along the corridor to my present compartment and there take possession of me, temporarily directing my actions and supplanting my current self." (p. 185)
I don't know about you, but to me this sort of contemplation on the self is not very Kafkaesque -- not very at all. Kavan was openly indebted to the Czech master, but through her characters' profound inward expressions of despair and dreaminess, their self-reflection and psychotic breaks, she brings forward a question that surely lurks beneath the surface of Kafka's work but never openly rears its head: am I to blame?
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews