| |||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A posthumous display of a fine literary talent,
By A Customer
This review is from: My Soul in China: A Novella and Stories (Paperback)
A novella and nine short stories comprise this book. They were collected from the papers of Anna Kavan after her death in 1968. The novella is said to have been distilled from 90,000 to 30,000 words. On the whole the collection is an admirable showcase for the writer's talent. Whether Kavan or her literary executors are responsible for the novella's weak architecture, I don't know. I refer to the way the novella hopscotchs from one viewpoint to another. Is the story first person or third? The same confusion repeats in "Tiny Thing." John Gardner the novelist warned fiction writers about interrupting the wakening dream that is a reader's collaboration with a story. Experimentation is fine in fiction but the verities of clarity and coherence still need to be observed. A reader may not know where he'll end up in Lawrence Stern, Kafka, or Joyce but he certainly knows where he is. The inspiration for this tale of a woman's unsuccessful search for happin! ess with a husband and then a lover is the author's own divorce and a subsequent companionship with another man. There is a saying that everyone has at least one story in him or her. That's probably true. It does not follow that every one can make fiction from an experience. Anna Kavan could. Two facts influence most of the stories, one geographic, the social. They are set in the English milieu; they were written during the collegiate turbulent nineteen sixties. Some embody student attitudes of the period: struggle between generations, enmity toward machines, expectation that paradise lies somewhere beyond Earth. Readers are often dropped in a bleak future. In all there is the Kavan prose style, a jeweled examination of people and places. For most of her writing career Kavan was a drug addict. Other writers suffered a similar affliction: Coleridge in the Romantic era, Capote in modern times. What astounds about Anna Kavan is that her talent did not abate. Beset ! by so debilitating a habit, she continued to produce fascin! ating novels and short stories. Were she free of addiction, would her works be more numerous, as probing? A question not easily answered. What we have, though, is enough to wish we had more.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
