Name: Telepathy between the condemned
Item: Machines in the Head: Selected Short Writing
Author: steerpike

Machines in the Head: Selected Short Writing →

by Anna Kavan

Telepathy between the condemned

steerpike

Jul 24, 2024 9:48 PM

The nameless narrator(s?) of these stories are always obsessed with an encroaching icy cold, always at the inscrutable whims of faceless "advisers", and never quite view other people or their business as real... a wonderful mix of feeling seen and yet completely unmoored. Zero genre loyalty in the best Weird Lit way. Specters of heroin and the War always lurking in the background.

Favorite stories:

Fog: surprise horror story! super chilling tale of psychopathic killer, with a narrator so frank, lucid, even relatable, that you almost find a little comfort in her slice of life (reminded me in that way of they have always lived in the castle)
Machines in the Head: industrial society and its future but for women
Our City: really affecting depiction of books becoming little talismans inside a unfeeling/oppressive situation
A Bright Green Field: maybe the weirdest story, sort of reminded me of Egnaro by M John Harrison but with such captivating descriptions of lushness

Is it possible that I am still living in a world where the sun shines and flowers appear in the springtime? I thought I had been exiled from all that long ago. I rub my tired eyes; still there is sunlight, the rooks flap noisily about their nests in the old elms, and now I hear how sweetly the small birds are singing. But even as I stand there all these happy things start to recede, to become phantasmal, transparent as the texture of dream plasma, banished by the monstrous mechanical outlines of pulleys, wheels, shafts, which in their orderly, remorseless and too-well-known evolutions now with increasing insistence demand my attention.

yarb

1 year ago

I read Ice but got super bored wandering the junkscape. Some of these sound good though, especially the stuff about an overwhelming disgust for cars.

steerpike

1 year ago

Yeah I'd say it's worth checking out even if you didn't like ice. more variety, and lots of interesting stuff about (I assume, based on her bio) cars, industrialization, etc.