Anna Kavan's writing is inextricably tied up with the convolutions of her tragic life. Of course this is, to a greater or lesser extent, true of all writers…. Yet with Anna Kavan the stories and novels are so subjective in tone that it is as if she wishes, in reality, to write her own spiritual autobiography but, rather than do this, has dressed up her sufferings and longings in fictional terms. Often the short stories are little more than fragments illustrating individual paranoia or intense ...

Anna Kavan, like Anaïs Nin with whom she is often compared, is a cult writer. Her work is treasured by people who enjoy its sensitive probing of inner states and who do not require much in the way of narrative technique, imagination, or linguistic richness. The rawness of her personal experience in its rawest unworked state is apparently enough to satisfy. Like many cult figures, her life story is well known (nearly every one of her books contains an Introduction describing her lifelong addiction to ...

On coming to what [Eagle's Nest] is about—plotwise—one has no option but to rely on the narrator himself, a distracted soul who never knows exactly what is going on either. For him the screen between real and imaginary actions was attacked by woodworm some good while before the novel began. The narrator is first encountered behind a desk making Christmas angels out of papier mâché, loathing each one of them, and behind schedule to boot. From a successful career in business...

The dream encroached upon Anna Kavan's reality with such power as to submerge her ego. Yet, as Anaïs Nin has suggested in her introduction [to Neige suivi de mal aimées], Kavan's inner meanderings so unflinchingly delineated demonstrate an act of courage, even heroism. Neige is an esthetic, psychological and metaphysical probing. In a series of exciting metaphors and disemboweled images the author reveals her own divided and tortured soul: iced, congealed, hard, brittle, white, a...

[In her foreword to Sleep Has His House, Kavan wrote:] If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are born. Sleep Has His House describes in the nighttime language certain stages in the development of one in...

Anna Kavan is becoming known in this country at long last. Her death in 1968 deprived us of further stories, but the posthumous publication of her book Julia and the Bozooka brought her to the attention of reviewers, and hopefully, to a waiting public. Her Ice … is one of those rare books that has achieved an underground reputation. You may not find it in the s-f section, but in the "literary" section. Rightfully, it belongs in both. It makes use of a standard science-fiction nightmare:...