The fifteen stories here are all, in one way or another, like rearranged fragments of an autobiography—and Anna Kavan went through more than most during her life: bad marriages, children who died, a father who leapt to his death from an ocean liner, appalling periods utterly crushed by depression, spells in psychiatric institutions, numerous suicide attempts…and a long-standing drug addiction. That last gives a completely wrong impression though; during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, attitudes to heroin were far more relaxed than they are today and Kavan herself was the very opposite of the modern picture of an addict: rather genteel in fact, always immaculately turned out and her heroin supplied for years, perfectly legally, by her psychiatrist.
   Late in life she became a near-total recluse, burned all her letters, diaries and notes—and disappearing is a recurring theme in these stories. In ‘Out and Away’ for example, she describes the school to which she was offloaded as a girl by a cold and unloving mother; there she discovered the art of hiding in plain sight, of ‘disappearing’ by never speaking to anyone. Then there’s ‘Fog’, an extraordinary piece of writing describing the disconnection, the here-but-not-here feeling of unreality induced by heroin. And in ‘High in the Mountains’, where we find another way of not-being-here, we’re also confronted with what this is really all about.
   Put simply, by the time these were written Kavan had long since run out of either patience or sympathy for her own species—she found the human race exasperating and well-nigh unbearable. In her final novel, Ice, this is expressed less directly; but here, in ‘High in the Mountains’, she just comes right out with it: ‘I’ve never enjoyed my life, I’ve never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be. Human beings are hateful…how can I help hating them all? Sometimes they disgust me so much that I feel I can’t go on living among them—that I must escape from the loathsome creatures swarming like maggots all over the earth.’
   Shining through, there’s wonderful writing. ‘A Visit’ reads the way an Henri Rousseau painting might read, turned into words: lush jungle foliage, a dreamlike quality and a leopard silently padding in. And in ‘World of Heroes’ she found a reverse way of expressing her feelings: describing the one brief period of her life when she did truly feel part of it all, that she belonged—alongside, and as the equal of, the racing-car drivers of the 1920s who ‘risked their lives so casually’ and ‘out of their great generosity gave me the truth, paid me the compliment of not lying to me.’
   Half a century after her death, my reaction to her books has been the way I bet a lot of people must have felt on ‘discovering’ Franz Kafka: how come I’d never heard of this author before? Here, but not here, even now. ( )

It is a mistake to regard these tales as drug literature. That would be asserting the methodology over the condition. There is a shadowed isolation here. The gasping protagonists can't communicate. The need to do so is often suspect. Let us be precise here, Life is terrifying but People are horrible. The pair of stories featuring Burma appear less personal and thus oddly moving.

There are motifs which repeat and reverberate. Oblomov is a recurring character here. Not Goncharov's creation but rather a human tendency. This bloated conclusion appears worse than death to Kavan's constructions. Despite the accumulated weight of this tradition, these stories did touch. ( )

This was the first collection of Anna Kavan's stories to be published in the United States. I found the collection to be a bit uneven in terms of quality, although I still enjoyed it very much. Kavan openly references her heroin use in several stories, a few of which read to me like autobiography. I thought that these more realist stories were the weaker ones in the collection. There are others that read almost like transcriptions of dreams, or perhaps narcotic reveries. This is where Kavan excels, in the bending of reality, sometimes only so slightly, other times quite radically. A strong and desperate thread of misanthropic loneliness ties much of the collection together. The first story "The Old Address" clubs you over the head, leaving a blood trail to follow you through the book to the final story, the title story, the one she wrote the year before her death, the one that will smother you, leaving you empty and alone.

There is evidence here of the author's profound depression, of a deep penetrating isolation. Kavan clearly felt that she did not belong in this world. But there are also signs in these stories that point to her bitterness over loss of love. Ex-husbands loom in the gloaming. How much these failures and disappointments in love that she experienced contributed to her feelings of exclusion from society is unknown. We know she also had a troubled childhood where she suffered from an absence of affection. Depression and drug abuse followed, which may have sent her into a never-ending ping-pong match of cause-and-effect.

Kavan seems unable to connect on a general level with her fellow humans, although she did have a few close friends and confidantes during her life, at least one of whom left a jagged hole in her life when he died. Some of these people are recognizable in the book. Here and there in her fiction she lashes out at the world or bemoans her fate as an outsider, though she rarely strays into the territory of self-pity. I find some of these moments where she details the effects of her fate to be among her most intriguing; they feel real and she impresses me with her ability to translate these feelings into compelling fiction. It is a rare talent for a writer to be able to exclusively scour the depths of the inner life in such a fascinating, highly readable way. Of course Kafka comes to mind, but Kavan is her own writer, and while she may have been influenced by Kafka, she draws her own intricate map, one that bears little resemblance to any maps I've studied before. ( )