Anna Kavan

The Parso n

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The Parson was not published in Anna Kavan's lifetime, but found after her death in manuscript form. Thought to have been written between the mid 50s and early 60s, it presages, through its undertones and imagery, some of Kavan's last and most enduring fiction (such as Ice). It was published finally, to wide acclaim, by Peter Owen in 1995. The Parson of the title is not a cleric, but an upright young army officer so nicknamed for his apparent prudishness. On leave in his native homeland, he meets a rich and beguiling beauty, the woman of his dreams. The days that the Parson spends with Rejane, riding in and exploring the wild moorland have their own enchantment. But Rejane grows restless in this desolate land; doubtless in love with the Parson, she discourages any intimacy. Until that is, she persuades him to take her to a sinister castle situated on a treacherous headland … The Parson is less a tale of unrequited love than exploration of divided selves, momentarily locked in an unequal embrace. Passion is revealed as a play of the senses as well as a destructive force. There have been valid comparisons to Poe, Kafka and Thomas Hardy, but the presence of her trademark themes, cleverly juxtaposed and set in her risktaking prose, mark The Parson as 100% Kavan.
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126 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
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Quotes

  • b3394811670has quoted3 years ago
    He hated the women now more than ever for forcing him to dance with them; hating above all things to feel, against his hard, fit, muscular body, their soft, yielding semi-nakedness, which always seemed to exude a lustful excitement repugnant to him beyond words.
  • b3394811670has quoted3 years ago
    She rather disliked human beings, really. In the midst of her usual social existence and her love affairs, she remained alone, fundamentally. But she liked to have Oswald in the background, as long as he didn’t obtrude on her.
  • b3394811670has quoted3 years ago
    In its silence, particularly, the vast, pale, deserted landscape, with its bare islands of ghostly rock, seemed to her to exhale something hostile to human life, stony and arid, without sound or movement, a lifeless and empty scene. In the almost frightening silence she saw the house as the advance-post of some doomed expedition, recklessly daring the curse of that wintry region, already lying upon it in the shadow of the rocks overhead, balanced in precarious-seeming immensity, threatening to fall and crush it out of existence.

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