Anna Kavan

#2

1973

Since her death in 1968, there has been a strong revival of interest in Anna Kavan's work. Sleep Has His House, combining autobiography with surrealist experimentation, deserves to rank with the author's best works. In her foreword Anna Kavan writes: 'Life is tension or the result of tension; without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. 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 night-time language certain stages in the development of one individual human being. No interpretation is needed of this language we have all spoken in childhood and in our dreams; but for the sake of unity a few words before every section indicate the corresponding events of the day.' (From the book jacket, british reprint published in 1973).

#3

1936

The background of Helen Ferguson's new novel is a small English village in which Thomas Spender and his wife Judith form the centre of a community of very varying characters. Adam Green, a young poet and writer, comes back from the East and is caught up in the web if Judith's dreamy and yet possessive personality. There are many other threads in the story which act and react upon the principal theme and are inextricably interwoven with it. Miss Ferguson handles her many characers with great skill and particularly uses the art of anti-climax with such a success that the event to which everything in the story leads up never actually takes place. (From the book jacket, first british edition published in 1936).