Nobody equals Anna Kavan in evoking states of powerlessness, puzzlement, lostness, uncertainty, and paranoia, and in seeing through the eyes of people in those states of mind. I might have chosen any of the stories from this volume, the title story itself, or ‘The Blackout’ or ‘All Kinds of Grief Shall Arrive’, or ‘Now I Know Where My Place Is’ but I chose this one, because of an apparent inconsequentiality which sits uncomfortably with the unexplained scene of cruelty the narrator witnesses. Kavan’s stories are often thinking about cruelty, both casual and deliberate, and it’s extraordinary how much she manages to imply in this two-page story. It suggests interesting comparison with Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’, with Lord of the Fliesand with A.L. Barker’s observations of childhood.
First published in I am Lazarus, Jonathan Cape, 1945, and reprinted in Machines in the Head: Selected Short Writing, ed. by Victoria Walker, Peter Owen, 2019
A Personal Anthology 