more literary discoveries

from cult cargo:

Anna Kavan was born Helen Woods in Cannes on April 10th 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents. Her life was haunted by a remote, selfish and glamorous mother, upon whom she regularly revenged herself in her books. After completing her education in England, she married and for a time lived in Burma. The marriage failed but it was during this period that she began writing.
She became a heroin addict around 1926. Her intermittent mental illness, and the change of style in her work coincided with a change in her appearance and life-style after a breakdown. It was also at that time that she adopted the name of Anna Kavan, taken from a character in her novel Let Me Alone. She went through detox many times before her death, but always returned to what she called her "bazooka". She continued to write, even during periods of mental illness/depression which she spent in clinics in Switzerland and in England. Her experiences there provided material for Asylum Piece, a collection of short stories published in 1940.
At first she wrote traditional books, but later achieved a unique and sophisticated style, becoming that most rare of species: an english symbolist. She was a difficult personality all her life, but towards the end was even more anti-social and reclusive. She had a small collection of friends whose devotion overlooked her problems and eccentricities. Ironically, after a life of suicide attempts and heroin addiction, she died of natural causes in London on December 5th, 1968.

She remained a prolific writer throughout her life
Ice, her final novel, is a surrealist, sado-masochistic chase in a frozen world doomed to be crushed between walls of ice. The cold war is telescoped into the indignities suffered by a woman objectified, humiliated and abused by two men. Kavan's obsessions become universalised. It is more effective for being told in a cold, matter of fact, nouveau romain style. Ice is definitely a chid of the sixties. Kavan's writing has glaring similarities with Kafka's...the alienation, desire thwarted, destination forever out of reach. There is also a curious analogy of other claustrophobic cold war artefacts such as The Prisoner and the whole sixties spy thrilller thing. The story, of course has a forseeably tragic non-ending, but the detached and spare lyricism of Kavan's prose raises it above any genre or era.