![]() This critical acclaim is welcome, reviving earlier assessments of Kavan’s work. ![]() I learned that Kavan was a revered cult figure for her 1967 novel Ice, which has recently been reissued by Penguin Classics in a 50 th Anniversary edition to widespread critical acclaim. Like many initial readers, I was fascinated by Kavan’s biography-her upper-class upbringing in England, her two failed marriages, breakdowns, peripatetic wanderings, and lifelong heroin addiction, which resulted in a reinvented self: she bleached her brown hair, became waif thin, and changed her name from Helen Ferguson to Anna Kavan, the protagonist in Let Me Alone. One of the of the novels that appealed to me was Let Me Alone (1930), written by an author named Anna Kavan, an under-appreciated female writer of the twentieth century whose increasingly hallucinatory and experimental approaches to isolation, alienation, and madness made her body of work difficulty to classify. Every few months I’d receive a catalogue that sold novels, usually unknown to me, at steep discounts, and shipped them internationally. I first read Helen Ferguson/Anna Kavan in 1997 or 1998 when I was living in Ansan, an industrial city an hour subway ride from Seoul. ![]()
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