Pretty much every tale in Machines in the Head ends in existential suffering, inconclusive menace, our outright doom. …I began to wonder, as I have wondered ever since, whether the good opinion of anybody in the whole world is worth all that I have had to suffer and must still go on suffering - for how long oh, for how long? The nightmare-dream logic here is part and parcel of Kavan’s style, as is the the conclusion of “The Summons”:

In “The Summons,” an ugly waiter ruins a meal with an old friend, and our narrator is soon taken away by an ambiguous authority, only to return to dinner to have her friend urge her to go back to the authority on her own volition. “The Enemy” is five paragraphs of Kafkaesque persecution and paranoia. “Going Up in the World” is a miniature study of cold anxiety in which the unnamed protagonist suffers alienation from the “Patrons” who seem to abandon her. These stories announce themes and images that repeat throughout Kavan’s writing and this new NYRB collection: sleep, dreams, ice, sun (and the lack of sun), prisons, asylums, hospitals, lovers, friends (and the absence of friends), enemies, persecutors, mysterious patrons, strange summonses from abstract authorities, sentencing and judgment, windows, walls, doors. Machines in the Head is arranged chronologically, with the first nine stories coming from Asylum Piece (1940).

And while Kavan’s experimental forms shift from story to story, her modes of radical ambiguity, rattling paranoia, and sinister menace course through the collection, giving it a strange coherence. The stories here, culled from five previous collections, show not so much a stylistic evolution over three decades of Kavan’s writing as they do a writer pushing herself into ever stranger territory. Machines in the Head, new from NYRB, compiles twenty-three Anna Kavan stories that were originally published between 19, as well as one previously unpublished story.

Ice by anna kavan 1967