Anna Kavan

Sleep Has His House

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largely autobiographical account of an unhappy childhood, Sleep Has His House startled with its strangeness in 1948. Today it is one of Anna Kavan's most acclaimed books. A daring synthesis of memoir and surrealist experimentation, Sleep Has His House charts chronologically the stages of the subject's gradual withdrawal from all interest in and contact with the daylight world of received reality. Brief flashes of daily experience from childhood, adolescence and youth are described in what Kavan terms '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. Anna Kavan maintained that the plot of a book is only the point of departure, beyond which she tries to reveal that side of life which is never seen by the waking eye, but which dreams and drugs can suddenly illuminate. She spent the last ten years of her life literally and metaphorically shutting out the light; the startling discovery of Sleep has His House is how much these nighttime illuminations reveal her joy for the living world.
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157 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
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Quotes

  • sophiereenahas quoted9 years ago
    A soft antique rain falls. Twilight. The colours lavender to pigeon and pearl grey with the delicate green of a weeping willow tree on the left. Behind the willow hangs the suggestion of a cascade. In the middle distance, centrally placed, a small hill with a tomb—a simple shrine, it looks like—at the top.
  • sophiereenahas quoted9 years ago
    This is clearly the source from which the yellow artist in the boat draws his inspiration. The picture is finished. He holds it up and smiles at the complicated fantasy evolved by his brush-strokes. He smiles, the smile growing unclear as a breaker shatters its glassy curve on the reef, and a miniature rainbow, a storm-dog, slowly dissolves in spray over his head
  • sophiereenahas quoted9 years ago
    spines, tentacles, filaments, helmets, swords; with appendages like trailing banners; with veils, periscopes, carapaces, suckers, pincers, razors, nets.
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