Mercury

First lines

About this book

This hitherto unpublished novel, an exciting literary discovery, is from Anna Kavan's most creative period. A work of sustained imaginative vision, it contains some of the novelists' best hallucinogenic writing. The beautiful 'glass girl' Luz is pursued from one imaginary country to another by Luke, whose love for her becomes a pathological obsession. Luke is as bewitched, too, by the Indris, singing lemurs whose magical harmonies he encounters in a tropical forest of pellucid charms. The lemurs have no enemies in their jungle world 'where intelligence and affection were cherished, and destruction and cruelty had no place'. Luke has chosen his wandering life of exile to escape his own shortcomings and failure in human relations. And he wants to protect Luz, estranged from her sadistic husband Chas. Luke himself reveals shades of latent sadism and becomes dependent on tablets that induce horror, shame and ecstatic excitement. The narrative is projected like a series of dream sequences, enigma and illusion intertwined in the mound of Kafka. Yet, as in her novel Ice, Anna Kavan has fashioned a coruscating landscape of her own making - apocalyptic, compelling, unforgettable. (From the book jacket, first british edition published in 1994).

Themes & subjects

About the author

Anna Kavan

10 April 1901 – 5 December 1968

Anna Kavan was a British novelist, short story writer and painter. Originally publishing under her first married name, Helen Ferguson, she adopted the name Anna Kavan in 1939, not only as a nom de plume but as her legal identity. - Wikipedia