So, at the end of one chapter, Berg takes his father into his room to kill him, and, at the outset of the next chapter, congratulates himself on having acted: “At last I can rest in peace amen”; “At last action has supplanted idea and imagery.” Meanwhile the reader waits to know what happened in the space between the chapters: “The action, last night’s scene,” Berg thinks, teasing us, it seems, “let it take on a gradual formation.” Yet “last night’s scene” never does take on much “formation.” In place of action, or even the retrospective recounting of that action, we get a confusion of Berg’s self-questioning analysis interrupting the third person narrator’s account: It’s hard to imagine a book that clashes comedy and tragedy quite so blatantly as Berg, Ann Quin’s 1964 reimagining of the Oedipal myth (read an excerpt here.) Rare enough is a book that begins by stating its intention—

In 1964 the British novelist Ann Quin gave an extended interview about work, sex, relationships, men, and patriarchy to playwright and fellow Brit Nell Dunn for Dunn’s collection of interviews, Talking to Women. Quin and Dunn were in their late 20s and were struggling with the stodginess of respectable society. Dunn, who was married with children, admitted to wishing she lived like Quin, saying, “I feel a sort of envy for your freedom, this freedom of having a place and having time and space.” To which Quin, who lived alone in a lodging house, replied, “But is it freedom?”But how easy it is to deceive them by my own expressions. And I cannot deny a certain amount of pleasure in adopting an outward aspect, contrary to what my real feelings are. Quin’s prose is as sharp as a deadly blade, flashing between light and dark with arresting effect.’ Edwin Turner A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .’

Just enough of a perspective shift to mess with me a bit, but not enough that I totally lose it, I think. These are private documents, representations of inner selves, recordings of thoughts or impressions not meant primarily for others. They are personal records of the past. Indeed, it is the contrast, the tension between these inner lives and the outer reality of Leonard and Ruth’s day-to-day existence that creates one of the book’s primary tensions. It is a tension which Quin refuses to resolve. Greb’s spiral into delusion and possible madness is echoed by Quin’s atmospheric and evocative descriptions of Brighton in winter. Quin brilliantly captures the uncanniness of old British seaside resort towns out of season, the strangeness of finding oneself in these places shut down for the bleakness of winter. As events move further out of Greb’s control, he begins to question the very reality of the town around him, perhaps even to suspect that he is a fictional character, a shadow puppet in someone else’s play: There is a sense of futility to the act much of the time, even as he wavers between a blind sort of fury and his very deliberate attempts at murder. And Other Stories 2018 publication of The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments has refocused attention on experimental British novelist Ann Quin, who committed suicide in 1973 aged just 37, who was best known for her 1964 debut Berg.Even when recounting despair, Quin’s prose is as sharp as a deadly blade, flashing between light and dark with arresting effect. Reintroducing this exciting, important writer to the world is the perfect start to And Other Stories’ year of publishing women.’ Jonathan Coe Whatever the case may be, her writing was never less than cogent and purposeful, even at its most angular. The vague terms “experimental” and “avant garde,” which are routinely applied to Quin, convey something of her striking originality, but not the depth and perspicacity of her work. The development of her technique across her four novels, each of which has its own distinct atmosphere, can be interpreted as a search for expressive forms adequate to their underlying psychological tensions. Quin faces down madness with method, salvages a paradoxical artistic coherence from a fragmented reality, her attitude encapsulated in the quote from Albert Camus that concludes her autobiographical essay in The Unmapped Country: Brian Evenson and Joanna Howard, “Ann Quin,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol.23, iss.2 (Summer 2003). Three is a less comical work, but the satire is no less scalding. The novel opens in the home of Leonard and Ruth, a respectable middle-class couple. They are discussing a newspaper report of a man falling from a sixth-floor window – suicide, they presume. This prompts them to reflect on the recent death of their former houseguest, a young woman referred to throughout as S, who has apparently taken a boat out to sea and drowned herself. With a somber air of detachment, they set about absolving themselves: Three (Calder & Boyars, 1966; Dalkey Archive, 2005; And Other Stories, 2020, ISBN 978-1-911508-84-7)

Quin’s willingness to venture into such disturbing territory is a manifestation of her wider concern with unstable and distorted psychological states. Her characters move through a world that often appears distended and grotesque, full of menacing symbols and portents that seem to reflect their anxieties and neuroses. Their conflicted desires and moments of Dionysian release are always understood to contain a latent violence that can be directed inwardly or outwardly, but not eliminated or resolved. Their motivations are often opaque, even to themselves. “How difficult it is to judge even one’s own actions,” S reflects near the end of Three. “There never appears to be only the one reason.” Each of the three has used the others for their own purposes. Within the triad there has developed a series of dyadic alliances which allow each pairing to play themselves off against the excluded third. This has kept all three in a state of constant sexualized tension. Leonard and Ruth, who initially seem a fairly solid albeit predictable couple, are slowly revealed as unable to connect to one another, as torturing both themselves and one another, as perhaps incapable of real human feeling. Berg’s phantasies about killing his father draw an unmistakable Oedipal territory without falling into the usual cliches. The second voice interspersed throughout the novel is of Berg’s mother - Edith, who is intrisincally present without ever being physically there. Her alter-ego-like role is marked by a piercing ambivalence, where the quotes found scattered in between paragraphs at times reflect unconditional love, while at others clear disappointment, or even despise for her son. Ann Quin was born in 1936 in Brighton, England. She died there in 1973. The circumstances of her death are inconclusive, but it is commonly accepted that she committed suicide. She stripped naked and walked into the sea.

Worlds From the Word’s End

In more practical terms, a few of her old pals and peers from that time are still around, still writing. Larry and Lenore Goodell, friends of Quin’s and very much the custodians of that scene, live just up the road from Quin’s old place. I wanted to meet them, and get a sense, in person, of what it was like to know Quin and to be here during that time. One of Britain’s most adventurous post-war writers. Psychologically dark and sexually daring, Quin’s relentlessly experimental prose reads like nobody else.’ Deborah Levy Yet, instead of providing solutions, these recordings and inscriptions raise as many questions as they resolve, destabilizing Leonard and Ruth’s sense of one another as well as their sense of S. S has disrupted the fragile balance of the couple’s conventional existence, an existence which S both feels drawn to and repelled by. S’s fragmented and evocative style opens worlds of which Ruth and Leonard seem to be ignorant; there are glimpses of her troubled family life, hints of a love affair, but they remain glimpses and hints, indistinct shapes. Under the veil, it seems, lies another veil. Irish Times The Unmapped Country is an ideal title [for the collection]: Quin set off in search of unknown pleasures, a sensual experience of words and life both intimate and distant. What slight and elusive treasures she discovered there, what precious fragments.’ Julia Jordan

The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments, ed. Jennifer Hodgson (And Other Stories, 2018, ISBN 978-1-911508-14-4) Stewart Home Gives You Better Orgasms! An Interview With Playground". Stewart Home Society. 25 February 2012. Archived from the original on 17 August 2017 . Retrieved 10 July 2015.Quin’s spare prose line—Delphic, obscure and hauntingly suggestive—creates a comparably vertiginous kind of enchantment. To submit to this unique book’s spell is to experience, in language, a “fantastic dance of images, shapes, forms.”’