Sleep Has His House
Anna Kavan
Language: English
Pages: 96
ISBN: 0720604222
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A classic later novel by Anna Kavan.
A largely autobiographical account of an unhappy childhood, this daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation chronicles the subject's gradual withdrawal from the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence, and youth are described in what is defined as "nighttime language"—a heightened, decorative prose that frees these events from their gloomy associations.
The novel suggests we have all spoken this dialect in childhood and in our dreams, but these thoughts can only be sharpened or decoded by contemplation in the dark. Revealing that side of life which is never seen by the waking eye but which dreams and drugs can suddenly emphasize, this startling discovery illustrates how these nighttime illuminations reveal the narrator's joy for the living world
River Town: Two Years On The Yangtze
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
Throbbing, trampling noise while they are on the move which, as the leading ranks consolidate into a dense crowd in front of the public building, becomes shot through with conflicting march tunes, bursts of clapping, singing, cheers; also with boos and shouts; with sharp distant stabs of shots, breaking glass, screams. The latter sounds are barely audible in the centre of the crowd where enthusiasm is solid. Certainly the princess doesn’t hear them, she hears nothing but cheering voices, as she.
Figure walking across the now vacant waterfront and rapidly passing out of sight between the magnolias. Deep in the girl’s brain the conflict at once beginning shows in the swift movements of her eyes, back and forth, from the black-branched distant trees to the close shouting faces. Almost simultaneously with the start of the struggle it’s over, her crown tumbles off as she runs down the steps, sheers through the crowd of children, some of whom immediately start scuffling over the crown, which.
Glass dish cross-glittered with highlights showing glazed fruit-halves like visceral segments. Detail of a tall highly polished silver cup on its black stand, and of other shapes and sizes of trophies in various positions. Crossed and tangled in a spillikin pile, skates, hockey sticks, tennis rackets (with and without presses), cricket bats. A football-sized ball is shown just about to drop through a circular piece of netting projecting from a goal-post against a sky across which birds are.
Attention. And then the place is so huge and dreary, and every part of it is so much like every other part, that to find one’s way about in it seems an impossibility; to move in any direction is almost certainly to get lost among the hurrying crowds, the stacks of indiscriminate objects which are for ever collapsing as something is dragged out from the bottom, and then being chaotically heaped up anew. Still, she can’t stand in one place indefinitely, to be jostled and pushed from one side to.
Died I knew why the house had always been quiet. The house had been waiting and watching from the beginning, listening to the steps my mother danced with her death. My father never told me about what had happened. No one said anything to me about the death of my mother and I never asked anyone. It was a question which could not possibly ever be asked. But I often wondered. At night, especially, I used to wonder. Sometimes I got afraid in the night, wondering about death and myself and my mother,.