Anna Kavan: Intense, Haunting, Disturbing
#nsfw trigger warnings: #depression, #suicide #books
A post about a little-known English author.
Reading her short story, The Old Address, feels like someone has been eavesdropping on my darkest thoughts in my darkest moments. It's an eerie feeling, but also comforting.
Thanks again to D on Goodreads who – to the best of my knowledge – still has no idea that I'm stalking her literary choices. I mean what is Goodreads for if not to find some future version of yourself that is pre-reading all of your books and rating them, so that present-day you need spend time and money only on the ones with 5-star reviews? That is literally the only reason that Goodreads exists.
But in all seriousness, Anna Kavan's work from her collection of short stories, Julia & The Bazooka, deeply resonates with me. Journalist Virginia Ironside says in her Introduction to Julia:
(Trigger warnings: depression, suicide)
True, she's not a writer for those who like uplifting books or happy endings. She writes of a terrifying inner landscape of evil and threat – a landscape that she seemed to inhabit for most of her life. All is arid and destitute, every minute is spent waiting for a reprieve that never comes or, worse, a punishment ...
And yet, for anyone who has experienced the merest whisper of true depression or mental illness, her books ... are strangely reassuring and comforting. Reading them is like coming across a guide to a country you thought that only you had visited ... she writes as a true citizen of that strange interface between reality and hell.
An excerpt from Julia & The Bazooka, The Old Address.
Trigger warnings: depression, suicide.
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.
I can't die in it either, apparently. Demented, in utter frenzy, I rush madly up and down, hurl myself like a maniac into the traffic, bang my head with all my force against walls. Nothing changes. It makes no difference.
The horror goes on just the same. It was enough that the world seemed to me vile and hateful for it to be so. And so it will remain, until I see it in a more favorable light which means never.
Julia and The Basooka by Anna Kavan