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Mercury

Mercury

by Anna Kavan
Paperback
Publication Date: 01/11/1995

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$44.95
This hitherto unpublished novel, an exciting literary discovery, is from Anna Kavan's most creative period. A work of sustained imaginative vision, it contains some of the novelists' best hallucinogenic writing. The beautiful "glass girl" Luz is pursued from one imaginary country to another by Luke, whose love for her becomes a pathological obsession. Luke is as bewitched, too, by the Indris, singing lemurs whose magical harmonies he encounters in a tropical forest of pellucid charms. The lemurs have no enemies in their jungle world "where intelligence and affection were cherished, and destruction and cruelty had no place." Luke has chosen his wandering life of exile to escape his own shortcomings and failure in human relations. And he wants to protect Luz, estranged from her sadistic husband Chas. Luke himself reveals shades of latent sadism and becomes dependent on tablets that induce horror, shame and ecstatic excitement. The narrative is projected like a series of dream sequences, enigma, and illusion intertwined in the mound of Kafka. Yet, as in her novel Ice, Anna Kavan has fashioned a coruscating landscape of her own making--apocalyptic, compelling, unforgettable.
ISBN:
9780720609844
9780720609844
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
01-11-1995
Language:
English
Publisher:
Peter Owen Publishers
Country of origin:
United Kingdom
Pages:
136
Dimensions (mm):
210x138x13mm
Weight:
0.21kg
Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan was born in 1901, the only child of a wealthy British family. She began publishing under her married name, Helen Ferguson.

During this time, she was introduced to heroin by her tennis coach in order to improve her game. She suffered a breakdown after the end of her second marriage, and was committed to an institution to treat both her depression and her addiction.

She published her two best-known novels after this experience, Asylum Piece and Ice, under 'Anna Kavan', the name of a character in an earlier novel. She died of heart failure at her home in London in 1968.

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