![]() ![]() ![]() But while her work can certainly be informed by her personal life, it is by no means reducible to it. In fact, her name was adopted after a particularly formative breakdown previously writing under her married name of Helen Ferguson, she lifted the name “Anna Kavan” from a character in one of her earlier novels. ![]() Her rich but troubling biography reveals unhappy marriages, institutionalization, a name change, suicide attempts, and heroin addiction. ![]() Kavan is a writer whose oeuvre, perhaps more than others, is complexly bound up with her identity. The Penguin Classics edition now boasts a foreword by Jonathan Lethem and an afterword by Kate Zambreno both are formidable names that use their own styles and selves as writers to bring fresh context to Kavan in the twenty-first century. Kavan is a brilliant high-modernist writer whose work has largely fallen by the wayside, and it is truly a blessing that we have a new version. Ice, her most successful novel, has been reissued by Penguin Classics for its fiftieth anniversary. There is always a sort of subconscious suspicion that comes with books that are “rescued from obscurity”: how good is something, really, if it gets forgotten about? So I am always hesitant regarding “rediscovered masterpieces.” Fortunately this is not so in the case of Anna Kavan. ![]()
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