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Let Me Alone: A Novel
Anna Kavan's reputation is escalating internationally, and translations of her books are appearing in many languages. This early novel is therefore of especial interest, as an account of personal stresses which she was later to use and develop in more subjective and experimental ways. Indeed, it was the name of the central character of Let Me Alone that the author chose when she changed her name as a writer (and her personal identity) from Helen Ferguson to Anna Kavan.
Sharp characterization combines with fine descriptive writing, especially of the Burmese countryside. In addition to is literary interest, the book, originally published in 1930, evokes life in England and is colonies from the early years of the century through the period following the First World War.
Sharp characterization combines with fine descriptive writing, especially of the Burmese countryside. In addition to is literary interest, the book, originally published in 1930, evokes life in England and is colonies from the early years of the century through the period following the First World War.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
6 people are currently reading
368 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.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 7, 2018
Helen Ferguson published six novels between 1929 and 1937. This was the third, from 1930, the story of a lonely outsider in passive rebellion against an unbearable world. Shipped off to stay with an indifferently cheerful butterfly-aunt after her father's death amid the general lack of options open to smart young women circa the first world war, our protagonist is denied college and pushed into a stifling marriage as the seeming only means of escape. This outsider-protagonist is named Anna Kavan. A decade after the publication of this novel, author Helen Ferguson, following a breakdown and creative renewal, legally changed her name to Anna Kavan, stepping into a persona that had really been herself all along.
And so it is: this may be the closest to autobiography Kavan ever went. The uncaring aunt is actually her mother, and surely other details have been altered as well, but the general overpowering rage and loathing that permeate this story are surely Kavan's own. Certainly, elements of this template appear over and over (the mother-daughter relationship is central to A Scarcity of Love, the time in Burma is hallucinatorily stripped down and recreated in Who Are You?) but never so purely as here.
This is one of those stories where the protagonist is trapped by a terrifyingly narrow set of options, which, to the modern reader may seem sort of artificial. I wanted to yell out at many points for Kavan to reject the hand given her, to chose something, anything else. But this isn't the story of a modern female protagonist allowed the luxury of a sense of independence and options by familial or cultural context. No, this is about a family and society bent on training despair and passive acceptance into its children. And on the casual unseeing misogyny perpetuated by the same on a massive scale (for a particularly enraging case, see the supposedly well-meaning publisher who turns Kavan down because young ladies don't need self-sustaining jobs when marriage will take care of them just fine. Or the entirety of the marriage that results.) What's amazing about this is not that Kavan allows herself to shuttled off into unsatisfactory circumstances without a fight so often here, but that the real Kavan was somehow able to amass the fight to escape her marriage and live much of the rest of her life on her own means and skills thereafter.
As autobiographical-realist-Kavan, I was most interested in this as insight into its author, the narrative and construction not nearly so memorable as in her later work once she'd discovered Kafka and surrealism and begun reshaping her style into something touched by both yet ultimately very much her own. The plot has something of the meandering arc of a memoir, and like a memoir, starting and stopping points are somewhat arbitrary. Still, there's a definite slow-burning build-up here, a sequential narrowing of choices directing Kavan and reader to the boiling point of a summer in the tropics when something somewhere must finally give. As such, there's a steady ramping-up of the language, too, from early detachment to a nightmarish internal battle described with a sustained intensity that's both uniquely horrific for its autobiography, but also totally exhausting after a while. It seems such a mood could never continue without break, but the terrible truth of Kavan's life seems to have been that it went on and on, and so must we, trailing behind her.
And so it is: this may be the closest to autobiography Kavan ever went. The uncaring aunt is actually her mother, and surely other details have been altered as well, but the general overpowering rage and loathing that permeate this story are surely Kavan's own. Certainly, elements of this template appear over and over (the mother-daughter relationship is central to A Scarcity of Love, the time in Burma is hallucinatorily stripped down and recreated in Who Are You?) but never so purely as here.
This is one of those stories where the protagonist is trapped by a terrifyingly narrow set of options, which, to the modern reader may seem sort of artificial. I wanted to yell out at many points for Kavan to reject the hand given her, to chose something, anything else. But this isn't the story of a modern female protagonist allowed the luxury of a sense of independence and options by familial or cultural context. No, this is about a family and society bent on training despair and passive acceptance into its children. And on the casual unseeing misogyny perpetuated by the same on a massive scale (for a particularly enraging case, see the supposedly well-meaning publisher who turns Kavan down because young ladies don't need self-sustaining jobs when marriage will take care of them just fine. Or the entirety of the marriage that results.) What's amazing about this is not that Kavan allows herself to shuttled off into unsatisfactory circumstances without a fight so often here, but that the real Kavan was somehow able to amass the fight to escape her marriage and live much of the rest of her life on her own means and skills thereafter.
As autobiographical-realist-Kavan, I was most interested in this as insight into its author, the narrative and construction not nearly so memorable as in her later work once she'd discovered Kafka and surrealism and begun reshaping her style into something touched by both yet ultimately very much her own. The plot has something of the meandering arc of a memoir, and like a memoir, starting and stopping points are somewhat arbitrary. Still, there's a definite slow-burning build-up here, a sequential narrowing of choices directing Kavan and reader to the boiling point of a summer in the tropics when something somewhere must finally give. As such, there's a steady ramping-up of the language, too, from early detachment to a nightmarish internal battle described with a sustained intensity that's both uniquely horrific for its autobiography, but also totally exhausting after a while. It seems such a mood could never continue without break, but the terrible truth of Kavan's life seems to have been that it went on and on, and so must we, trailing behind her.
December 9, 2014
Oftentimes, an author's oeuvre begs to be read in chronological order; in this way, readers can trace the development of this particular author's style, voice, their major themes, their departures from normative form—James, Joyce, Forster, and Woolf come to mind, all figures with whom Kavan is in dialogue—and how their "minor" works of the younger years can be dissected in various ways as formative experiments necessarily to pave the way for the "major" works of the later years.
But Anna Kavan's work is different. Most famous for Ice, her last completed novel, Kavan has a reputation in her fiction for deeply focused psychological portraits that prove the precarious boundary line between reality and fantasy, waking life and dreams, hopes and hallucinations—and her prose style is just as precarious as her thematic concerns. In Ice, Sleep Has His House, and Asylum Piece—currently, the only other Kavan I've read; all links to my reviews here on Goodreads—Kavan's prose is eerie, icy, stark, cunning, malicious, and also extremely fragile.
And yet this is not the case with Let Me Alone, one of Kavan's earlier novels written under her given name, Helen Woods. While there are several novels from this early period—a period prior to Kavan's hospitalization from suicide attempts and a heroin addiction that remarkably had little negative impact, according to her friend and executor Rhys Davies, until the last year of her life, during the writing of IceKavan is more rightfully known for her surreal work from the 1940s onward. However, Let Me Alone, her second novel written in 1930, is perhaps critical to understanding why Kavan changed. And here I don't mean only her style, but also her persona, for Kavan did, after all, change her name after the protagonist in Let Me Alone, signaling an appellative marker: not only am "I" not "Helen Woods," but "I" am also not "Anna Kavan," for she is a fictional creation. Additionally, this flags Let Me Alone as a text with which Kavan continued to identify later in life, after changing her name and her style; as such, the text is imperative reading for any fan of Kavan's work.
But take this with the caveat I noted above: Kavan's work is best worked through back to front. Like a psychotropic butterfly, the Kavan we know—and the Kavan whom many surrealists, from Nin onward, so admired—seems to have emerged from nowhere. The voices in Ice, Sleep Has His House, and the short pieces collected in Asylum Piece (which may also be read as a kind of novel) are at odd variance with the narrative voice in Let Me Alone, and yet Kavan points to this novel, stating, in effect, "I am Anna Kavan,<" but with a new and newly-coiffed persona to outwit Flaubert's famous assertion: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." (This Flaubert aside works here, too: Kavan is channeling many Ur-texts while trying to find her own style, Madame Bovary being one, fused with a sort of Lawrencian sensibility that invokes the schematic of Lady Chatterley's Lover but is more rooted stylistically in his works with heavy-handed symbolism like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.)
Let Me Alone registers, however, only for those acquainted with the literature of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods; like James and Woolf, to name two authors to whom I referred above, Kavan-as-Woods is writing a class satire in which the convention of the bildungsroman is used to consider gender and its sociocultural constraints on one woman's life, a woman named Anna-Marie Forrester whose marriage rechristens her with a new nom du père: Kavan. At times, I was reminded of Woolf's early work, particularly The Voyage Out and Night and Day; like Woolf, Kavan-as-Woods is still working within normative forms in order to find her own footing and her own voice. And, also like Woolf, Kavan's concerns are at odds with the heteronormative worlds of fiction, and the deviations from conventions—while minimal to one not steeped in the period and its nuances—are considerable and even somewhat scandalous.
With that said, Let Me Alone is somehow rightfully famous only as a quiet and almost inconsequential formative text, a "minor" work that would pave the way for Kavan's "major" work written on the brink of and throughout the Second World War. In the same vein, it is a novel that would have been buried entirely has not Kavan emerged from her chrysalis with the power, violence, and intimacy of her later work, rendering this early novel of import if only for her continued identification with its queer, at times cliched, but oh-so-teeming protagonist: the one and only Anna Kavan.
But Anna Kavan's work is different. Most famous for Ice, her last completed novel, Kavan has a reputation in her fiction for deeply focused psychological portraits that prove the precarious boundary line between reality and fantasy, waking life and dreams, hopes and hallucinations—and her prose style is just as precarious as her thematic concerns. In Ice, Sleep Has His House, and Asylum Piece—currently, the only other Kavan I've read; all links to my reviews here on Goodreads—Kavan's prose is eerie, icy, stark, cunning, malicious, and also extremely fragile.
And yet this is not the case with Let Me Alone, one of Kavan's earlier novels written under her given name, Helen Woods. While there are several novels from this early period—a period prior to Kavan's hospitalization from suicide attempts and a heroin addiction that remarkably had little negative impact, according to her friend and executor Rhys Davies, until the last year of her life, during the writing of IceKavan is more rightfully known for her surreal work from the 1940s onward. However, Let Me Alone, her second novel written in 1930, is perhaps critical to understanding why Kavan changed. And here I don't mean only her style, but also her persona, for Kavan did, after all, change her name after the protagonist in Let Me Alone, signaling an appellative marker: not only am "I" not "Helen Woods," but "I" am also not "Anna Kavan," for she is a fictional creation. Additionally, this flags Let Me Alone as a text with which Kavan continued to identify later in life, after changing her name and her style; as such, the text is imperative reading for any fan of Kavan's work.
But take this with the caveat I noted above: Kavan's work is best worked through back to front. Like a psychotropic butterfly, the Kavan we know—and the Kavan whom many surrealists, from Nin onward, so admired—seems to have emerged from nowhere. The voices in Ice, Sleep Has His House, and the short pieces collected in Asylum Piece (which may also be read as a kind of novel) are at odd variance with the narrative voice in Let Me Alone, and yet Kavan points to this novel, stating, in effect, "I am Anna Kavan,<" but with a new and newly-coiffed persona to outwit Flaubert's famous assertion: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." (This Flaubert aside works here, too: Kavan is channeling many Ur-texts while trying to find her own style, Madame Bovary being one, fused with a sort of Lawrencian sensibility that invokes the schematic of Lady Chatterley's Lover but is more rooted stylistically in his works with heavy-handed symbolism like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.)
Let Me Alone registers, however, only for those acquainted with the literature of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods; like James and Woolf, to name two authors to whom I referred above, Kavan-as-Woods is writing a class satire in which the convention of the bildungsroman is used to consider gender and its sociocultural constraints on one woman's life, a woman named Anna-Marie Forrester whose marriage rechristens her with a new nom du père: Kavan. At times, I was reminded of Woolf's early work, particularly The Voyage Out and Night and Day; like Woolf, Kavan-as-Woods is still working within normative forms in order to find her own footing and her own voice. And, also like Woolf, Kavan's concerns are at odds with the heteronormative worlds of fiction, and the deviations from conventions—while minimal to one not steeped in the period and its nuances—are considerable and even somewhat scandalous.
With that said, Let Me Alone is somehow rightfully famous only as a quiet and almost inconsequential formative text, a "minor" work that would pave the way for Kavan's "major" work written on the brink of and throughout the Second World War. In the same vein, it is a novel that would have been buried entirely has not Kavan emerged from her chrysalis with the power, violence, and intimacy of her later work, rendering this early novel of import if only for her continued identification with its queer, at times cliched, but oh-so-teeming protagonist: the one and only Anna Kavan.
February 26, 2020
“Her eyes stared at him coldly, he felt almost afraid. Just for a moment he saw her coldness, he saw the unyielding hardness that was in her, the unchanging remoteness; even cruelty. Not a personal, deliberate cruelty, but that much more devastating cruelty that comes from indifference, from sheer, absolute, deadly carelessness, the ultimate affront.”
I admire that she wrote this about herself.
I also think it’s kind of funny how her self-insert is shown as being justifiably contemptuous of everyone she encounters apart from lesbians, who are not entirely approved of, are maybe written as a little predatory, but are out there being smart and sharp and living their lives honestly unlike everyone else.
I guess I should say that Kavan’s racism is really on display in the last chunk of this book (“There was a nameless, unpleasant smell of food and dirt and dark-skinned humanity”) but is that surprising? British whites writing their thoughts on The East... no good has ever come from this. And that combined with Kavan’s determined superiority complex gives you passages like this: “She was not afraid any more. All this herd of dusky creatures seething and surging had no power to alarm her. It was not the natives who had made her afraid. But the evil breath of that noxious place, and the evil thing which germinated there.” It’s still something to be reminded of how unbelievably dumb and freakish and ugly British whites are though... Kavan writes this about when she was in Egypt:
“They began to walk along. The dark faces were still ceaselessly passing, and hemming them in, and staring with a strange, sneering, slightly obscene curiosity, in the flary dark. Findlay seemed unaware. But Anna felt herself violated. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling of violation, of having her privacy exposed and desecrated. She wanted to get away from all the dark faces – never to see them again – never while she lived.”
Pathetic white freakery. I wonder how racist Ice will seem on rereading it, if I ever do.
I admire that she wrote this about herself.
I also think it’s kind of funny how her self-insert is shown as being justifiably contemptuous of everyone she encounters apart from lesbians, who are not entirely approved of, are maybe written as a little predatory, but are out there being smart and sharp and living their lives honestly unlike everyone else.
I guess I should say that Kavan’s racism is really on display in the last chunk of this book (“There was a nameless, unpleasant smell of food and dirt and dark-skinned humanity”) but is that surprising? British whites writing their thoughts on The East... no good has ever come from this. And that combined with Kavan’s determined superiority complex gives you passages like this: “She was not afraid any more. All this herd of dusky creatures seething and surging had no power to alarm her. It was not the natives who had made her afraid. But the evil breath of that noxious place, and the evil thing which germinated there.” It’s still something to be reminded of how unbelievably dumb and freakish and ugly British whites are though... Kavan writes this about when she was in Egypt:
“They began to walk along. The dark faces were still ceaselessly passing, and hemming them in, and staring with a strange, sneering, slightly obscene curiosity, in the flary dark. Findlay seemed unaware. But Anna felt herself violated. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling of violation, of having her privacy exposed and desecrated. She wanted to get away from all the dark faces – never to see them again – never while she lived.”
Pathetic white freakery. I wonder how racist Ice will seem on rereading it, if I ever do.
October 14, 2017
It was interesting to dwell into one of Anna’s works from before she was really Anna. Let Me Alone was published in 1930 when she still went by the name of Helen Ferguson. This work is said to mark the author’s change of name and, in a way, identity; at least it involves the very introduction of Anna Kavan as its fictional heroine and the very name the author would later undertake.
I liked it. It is not as experimental and symbolic as her later works. I was not overwhelmed by it as I have been by her writing before but I will never not be impressed by it. There always seems to be a sadness and darkness there.
It is a highly autobiographical work and is based on Anna’s own marriage. It is an account from childhood; and of a particular isolation and sort of schizophrenic condition that is very characteristic in Kavan’s characters. Anna (fictional) has felt trapped ever since she was left an orphan by a mother who died in childbirth and a father who shot himself when she was thirteen (after in a moment of dizzy depression having considered killing Anna as well). Her aunt forces her into a marriage and Anna is forced to give up the few things she has actually desired in life; a scholarship at Oxford and a romance with a girl she met at boarding school.
My favourite aspect about Let Me Alone is Kavan’s exploration of femininity, sexuality and gender. This, to me, seemed an as crucial theme as Anna’s isolation. Anna – not immediately related but perhaps not entirely unrelated to a lack of a mother-figure in her life – is seen to find a great fascination with the women in her life; most prominently with her aunt Lauretta and the headmaster of her boarding school, Rachel. A fascination that sometimes dwells into attraction but also intimidation and even hostility:
Anna seems to very aware of a certain responsibility of characteristics that comes with femininity; she is described at her happiest whenever she is confronted with alternative outlooks on gender expectations. Firstly, there’ Sidney, the girl she gets drawn too at boarding school and dwells into a so-called “romantic friendship” with. Then there’s her meeting with the prospect of gender fluidity in Burma; the fusion of what is considered traditional and “natural” female versus male qualities. She regards the locals and is excited about the potential it suggests:
On a related note, the dominating premise of masculinity and the character of a sadistic husband is also a reoccurring element in Kavans writing that occurs, perhaps most noticeably that I yet know of, in Ice.
I liked it. It is not as experimental and symbolic as her later works. I was not overwhelmed by it as I have been by her writing before but I will never not be impressed by it. There always seems to be a sadness and darkness there.
It is a highly autobiographical work and is based on Anna’s own marriage. It is an account from childhood; and of a particular isolation and sort of schizophrenic condition that is very characteristic in Kavan’s characters. Anna (fictional) has felt trapped ever since she was left an orphan by a mother who died in childbirth and a father who shot himself when she was thirteen (after in a moment of dizzy depression having considered killing Anna as well). Her aunt forces her into a marriage and Anna is forced to give up the few things she has actually desired in life; a scholarship at Oxford and a romance with a girl she met at boarding school.
My favourite aspect about Let Me Alone is Kavan’s exploration of femininity, sexuality and gender. This, to me, seemed an as crucial theme as Anna’s isolation. Anna – not immediately related but perhaps not entirely unrelated to a lack of a mother-figure in her life – is seen to find a great fascination with the women in her life; most prominently with her aunt Lauretta and the headmaster of her boarding school, Rachel. A fascination that sometimes dwells into attraction but also intimidation and even hostility:
"She rather resented the goddess aspect of Rachel: and her actual physical aspect, so lavish in its rich maturity, like a gorgeous, soft fruit. Rachel would touch her, would take her arm, or her small, cool hand… And immediately she would be made uncomfortably conscious of the full, feminine body under the bright clothes, the soft, white-fleshed limbs, the rich female luxuriousness."
Anna seems to very aware of a certain responsibility of characteristics that comes with femininity; she is described at her happiest whenever she is confronted with alternative outlooks on gender expectations. Firstly, there’ Sidney, the girl she gets drawn too at boarding school and dwells into a so-called “romantic friendship” with. Then there’s her meeting with the prospect of gender fluidity in Burma; the fusion of what is considered traditional and “natural” female versus male qualities. She regards the locals and is excited about the potential it suggests:
"And the fantastic figures of the men going about, so womanish with their coloured skirts and their long black hair turned up in a bun or swathed round in tortoiseshell comb – altogether womanlike until you saw their smallish, metallic faces which had a curious small-scale maleness of their own, a sort of masculinity in miniature. Like men dressed up as women in a pantomime they were, after you had seen their male faces. Anna was exhilarated."
On a related note, the dominating premise of masculinity and the character of a sadistic husband is also a reoccurring element in Kavans writing that occurs, perhaps most noticeably that I yet know of, in Ice.
May 28, 2024
pp 314-315 big wow
September 24, 2015
Helen Ferguson's 3rd novel, the one that saw the first appearance of a character called "Anna Kavan". She is the only child of James Forrester, and it's easy to see "Forrestor" as a flimsy disguise for "Woods", her maiden name. Both the fictional and real fathers of the fictional and real Anna Kavans committed suicide, and the subsequent lives of their daughters are broadly similar (taken in my unloving relatives, prevented from taking the place at Oxford, early marriage to an unsuitable colonial official posted to Burma). It is implied that the fictional Forrester commits suicide due to having sexual feelings for his child. We don't know if that is an autobiographical detail.
This book is a forecast for Kavan's mature post-War fiction, with the heavy emphasis on its central character's sense of disconnection from her surroundings. "Unreal" and "unreality" turn up in increasing frequency toward the end. But we get more specific details of Britain in the 1920s, and this brings out the tremendous (and usually unconsciously accepted) privilege in which Anna lives. In this version the husband is clearly of lower social standing, something like the middle-class poverty George Orwell observed later. His family can't afford servants, the younger sister is treated as a drudge. Anna asks her why she doesn't run away, but we never hear Anna herself considering that option. When she travels out to the colonies, the charming "natives" are not much more than objects of curiosity, whilst the major problem with the wives in the Clubhouse is their provincialism and philistinism, not the system they are part of.
Anna is able to exert quite a lot of control over her life once she has Matthew Kavan. The incident of the visitor, which is retold as a scene of brutal bullying force in the later "Who Are You?", is much quieter in this version. I have to wonder how far Anna's sense of unrealness or remoteness in others is coming from herself, her own detached selfishness, rather than psychical oppression from enemies trying to dominate her. But it's not clear that the narrator demands unconditional sympathy for her character. She is just setting out the problem of Anna Kavan, as a first step to making progress. "She had her own thoughts to attend to." is the conclusion, what comes next is the attempt at self-definition in "A Stranger Still".
This book is a forecast for Kavan's mature post-War fiction, with the heavy emphasis on its central character's sense of disconnection from her surroundings. "Unreal" and "unreality" turn up in increasing frequency toward the end. But we get more specific details of Britain in the 1920s, and this brings out the tremendous (and usually unconsciously accepted) privilege in which Anna lives. In this version the husband is clearly of lower social standing, something like the middle-class poverty George Orwell observed later. His family can't afford servants, the younger sister is treated as a drudge. Anna asks her why she doesn't run away, but we never hear Anna herself considering that option. When she travels out to the colonies, the charming "natives" are not much more than objects of curiosity, whilst the major problem with the wives in the Clubhouse is their provincialism and philistinism, not the system they are part of.
Anna is able to exert quite a lot of control over her life once she has Matthew Kavan. The incident of the visitor, which is retold as a scene of brutal bullying force in the later "Who Are You?", is much quieter in this version. I have to wonder how far Anna's sense of unrealness or remoteness in others is coming from herself, her own detached selfishness, rather than psychical oppression from enemies trying to dominate her. But it's not clear that the narrator demands unconditional sympathy for her character. She is just setting out the problem of Anna Kavan, as a first step to making progress. "She had her own thoughts to attend to." is the conclusion, what comes next is the attempt at self-definition in "A Stranger Still".
August 3, 2016
"There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would seem to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-world of confusion and loss. This is what had happened to Anna."
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September 26, 2025I don't know any person who is capable of capturing the helpless, ensnared feeling of childhood and teenage years better than Anna Kavan. A feeling of being utterly alone in this whole world, where you can depend on only yourself, and when everything fails where you let go existing as a material thing. Devoid of any individual piece of yourself- except something buried deep in your heart.
Perhaps it's about being a woman. Perhaps Anna Kavan and I experienced something which was not explainable by loud words but only in silent writings to oneself. This book, indeed, feels like a letter Anna Kavan wrote to herself. Letters I wrote to myself.
I cannot rate it, because reading this was beyond personal. Nothing ever goes right in this book, but I can still see the glimpses of the young woman Anna Kavan once was in that hopeful ending. Will salvation ever occur? Will future ever be capable of making your dreams come true, or making you be able to dream again? I don't know, but when you are so young, only that kind of hope can make you turn back to life.
Perhaps it's about being a woman. Perhaps Anna Kavan and I experienced something which was not explainable by loud words but only in silent writings to oneself. This book, indeed, feels like a letter Anna Kavan wrote to herself. Letters I wrote to myself.
I cannot rate it, because reading this was beyond personal. Nothing ever goes right in this book, but I can still see the glimpses of the young woman Anna Kavan once was in that hopeful ending. Will salvation ever occur? Will future ever be capable of making your dreams come true, or making you be able to dream again? I don't know, but when you are so young, only that kind of hope can make you turn back to life.
October 25, 2023
3.25 This book is rather dark in a good way and you can really feel the narrator's contempt, anger and disgust throughout. Combined with the author's biography, this makes for a worthwhile read. However, it is rather repetitive and overall lacked an intriguing storyline.
February 5, 2024
One of the best books I have ever read. I felt so badly and yet so frustrated for Anna. There were a few places where there were a good number of 'lists,' but this is an incredibly emotional book that breaks your heart.
August 12, 2020
An interesting example of Anna Kavan’s early work, far more conventional than the elliptical, experimental narratives commonly associated with the author of Ice. This is essentially a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age story. Starting in 1901, it follows a central character Anna from her birth to her later teenage years: her malicious father, ‘pleasure-greedy, butterfly’ aunt/guardian, her isolation at boarding-school where academic interests provide brief respite from a relentlessly miserable existence. Then a disastrous marriage and relocation to colonial Burma which sparks Anna’s unexpected, long-overdue rebellion.
Despite the clumsy, overwritten aspects of Kavan’s prose style, the narrative has an underlying intensity that engaged my attention, and got me past the duller passages. It was also fascinating as a representation of the possible lives of women of the period, social dislocation, the potentially-suffocating power of family, and the impact of an upbringing close to Victorian stereotypes in its emphasis on innocence and the withholding of knowledge both physical and economic. Unlike other near-contemporaries Mansfield, Sinclair or Woolf, the fiercely private Kavan had no wider intellectual circle to sustain her in building her writing career, so her journey to independence was entirely based on her own resilience. In that way Anna’s character contains possible echoes of Kavan herself, making this an intriguing glimpse of Kavan’s own struggle to find freedom and a voice.
Despite the clumsy, overwritten aspects of Kavan’s prose style, the narrative has an underlying intensity that engaged my attention, and got me past the duller passages. It was also fascinating as a representation of the possible lives of women of the period, social dislocation, the potentially-suffocating power of family, and the impact of an upbringing close to Victorian stereotypes in its emphasis on innocence and the withholding of knowledge both physical and economic. Unlike other near-contemporaries Mansfield, Sinclair or Woolf, the fiercely private Kavan had no wider intellectual circle to sustain her in building her writing career, so her journey to independence was entirely based on her own resilience. In that way Anna’s character contains possible echoes of Kavan herself, making this an intriguing glimpse of Kavan’s own struggle to find freedom and a voice.
April 26, 2013
The plot of the first chapters of the book makes me think about La Religieuse by Denis Diderot.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews