Nate D’s Comments (group member since Sep 17, 2012)

Nate D’s comments from the Completists' Club group.

Posthumous Memoirs was an excellent presentation of relatively ordinary material, to my ear, but I'd love to be told that he had improved the balance in another novel. Which would you recommend?

MJ Nichols: Completer, mobilizer, unburier.

I only just found it while trying to hunt down the uncollected stories this afternoon. I haven't even had a chance to read them yet, but it's incredible that they're there!

This leaves the following uncollected stories from Jim's list (including those in the two above collections, since those don't really make these stories much easier to find):

"Department of Slight Confusion." In Book: A Miscellany. No. 3, edited by Leo Bensemann & Denis Glover. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1941. (collected in the unpublished The Cactus Sign)

"New Zealand: An Answer to an Inquiry." Horizon VIII, no. 45, 1943, 153–61.

"The Big Bang." In Modern Short Stories, edited by Denys Val Baker. London: Staples & Staples, 1943. (collected in Five Months Further / Anna Kavan's New Zealand)

"Two New Zealand Pieces." In Choice, edited by William Sansom. London: Progressive Publishing, 1946. (presumably collected in Five Months Further / Anna Kavan's New Zealand)

"Brave New Worlds" In Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. London, 1946. Subtitled "The Professor".

"The Red Dogs." In Penguin New Writing, Vol. 37, edited by John Lehmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.
Also in: In Pleasures of New Writing: An Anthology of Poems, Stories, and Other Prose Pieces from the Pages of New Writing, edited by John Lehmann. London: John Lehmann, 1952.

"Edge of Panic." In Vogue, 1 October 1971, 75–83.

All of the Horizon material, including Kavan's reviews of the likes of Woolf and Huxley, can be found in a trove of PDFs here.

Here's another unpublished Kavan collection, from the Archive. The inclusions of "The Department of Slight Confusion" and "One of the Hot Spots"/"Lonely Unholy Shore" (later in Bright Green Field) place this as being prepared sometime between 1941 and 1958:

"The Cactus Sign." Typescript of proposed anthology of short stories with handwritten revisions:
"The Cactus Sign." p1-9.
"Lions Don't Live in China." p10-14.
"America's Wonderful. p15-20. (See also 2:3)
"Facing Up to Reality." p21-23.
"Some of the Things That Happen." p24-28.
"Memory of Maccassar." p29-32. (See also 2:6)
"Sorry I Can't Do Anything." p33-40.
"As Near As I Got to China." p41-47. (See also 2:4)
"Honey Don't You Mind." p48-54.
"Lonely Unholy Shore." p55-58.
"Department of Slight Confusion." p59-60.
"We Know All the Answers." p61-70.
"No More Roseate Views of the Tropics." p71-76.
"The Pain, the Island, Sweet Lady." p77-81.
"Subjects of General Interest." p82-87.
"Lord Have Mercy On Us." p88-91.
"Lover and Friend Hast Thou Put Far From Me and Mine Acquaintance Into Darkness." p92-108.
"One of the Hot Spots." p109-116.
"A Day in Batavia." p117-131. (See also 2:5)
"As Long As You Realize." p132-139.
"In Short I Was Afraid." p140-144.
"The Bank." p145-148.
"The Hotel." p149-153.
"The Lion." p154-158.
"The Hour." p159-161.
"Thinking About Sumatra." p162-167.
"There's Lovely." p168-172.
"The Second Tuesday." p173-177.
"Twelve Thousand Miles of It." p178-186.
"The Atom of God Near Balboa." p187-196.
"We Know the Boys Will Bring Us Our Joys." p197-208.

If you're like me, you're probably curious about
Jennifer Sturm's biography / collection Anna Kavan’s New Zealand), which is pretty expensive at present.

In addition to 54 pages of biographical material by Sturm (her doctorate thesis, I believe), it would seem that she has reproduced and made available the 18 autobiographical stories comprising the previously unpublished Kavan collection Five Months Further, composed in New Zealand from September 1942 to January 1943.

From the Kavan archive at the University of Tulsa:

"Five Months Further." Typed of proposed anthology of short stories with handwritten revisions:
3:7 "September." p280-301.
"The Voice of the Imagination." p302-306.
"The Man With Two Faces." p307-309.
"Any Day." p310-316.
"October." p317-322.
"Waitahanui Society." p323-237.
"Interval, Evans the Milk, O.H.M.S." p338-345.
"Labor Day." p346-352.
"November." p353-359.
"Rather Kafka." p360-369.
"Another Ending." p370-385.
"December." p386-404.
"Pacific." p405-408.
"The Big Bang." p409-413.
"Change At Colon." p414-423.
"Christmas Convoy." p424-449.
"January." p450-459.
"Losing the North." p460-475.

The Inquisitory does sound terribly interesting, and it is indeed an entirely unexpected inclusion. So yeah, more like that. Okay so here're some books that I hope will be more widely read than now (excerpts from my top-40 books, mostly, but I hope worthy ones):

Coleman Dowell - Island People
Now buried, but as dense and broad-reaching and experience-inclusive as anything necessitating Great Books inclusion.

Ann Quin - Tripticks
Tangled mass of televised modern meltdown and american experience that pioneered literary collage techniques and very much warrants many closer looks.

Anna Kavan - Ice
Though enjoying a massive resurgence lately (at least on GR), I still don't think it's given up all of its secrets and resonances yet. And a key moment in the evolution of subjective narrators in lit, I believe.

Sadegh Hedayat - The Blind Owl
Lest we ignore the world beyond Europe and the Americas, here's a key work of Persian modernism that prefigures the nouvelle roman in many ways.

Agota Kristof - The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels
A devastating phantasmagoria of the mid-20th century Europe, and of the inability of words and narrative to contain the truths at the heart of experience.

Samuel Delany - Dhalgren
All of Delany's science fiction is deft and urgent, the breadth and depth of his concerns and post-modern complexity make this a masterwork (admittedly, already a blockbuster compared to these others though)

Leonora Carrington - The Stone Door
Sprawling across time despite its fairy-tale concision, this is my favorite surrealist novel and a book deserving of much more study than it receives.

Bruno Schulz - The Messiah
An entirely lost work that I hope will have been re-found and canonized in the next century.

I guess I just meant that the future would surprise us more. How? Hard to say or it wouldn't be a surprise, but let's see some bigger risks. It's admittedly even more presumptuous for me to pick these, but some people who might be seen as key at some point in the future: Sadegh Hedayat, Kathy Acker, Samuel Delany, Agota Kristof, Alain Robbe-Grillet... I imagine the future will re-work our canon in ways we can't yet guess, though.

But sorry to be a complainer -- I still like seeing these, and hope you keep em coming.

It's a sort of boring list -- it assumes that the future won't form new opinions of the currently-overlooked, either.

In the last few weeks, I found both Ghost Town and Spanking the Maid in different dollar bins (my eyes always snap to the Grove logo immediately), so I'm just embarking on this one now.

7. Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Dreambook for Our Time

really is beautiful. And a pretty drastically buried book as well, compared to his arguably more perfectly constructed but less mesmerizing A Minor Apocalypse.

Hmmm, no, maybe not yet.

Yeah, this is a pretty compellingly eccentric list. I mean, it its a lot of widely-acknowledged highs, but they're often the really envelope-pushing ones that usually get pushed further down or off of other lists. And Delany twice?! I will be referring back to this one.

I now also really want to read some Joanna Russ. Thanks Katheter!

Like: completion of all Tel Quel works published before 1970 or whatever?

I guess Surrealist Novels is something I'm going to try to hit pretty hard even though some of them are going to be awful, inevitably.

Finally got around to trying Roubaud's lighter fictions and can now report that Our Beautiful Heroine was really pretty fun.

Seems to be. At least in the shadowy, always-empty annex, reached only via an underground tunnel from the main library, that houses fiction:

If only I'd had something other than the tiny library lamps, so I could get evener lighting!

I was back today photographing even more inventive type-setting from untranslated Maurice Roche novels, none of which had ever been checked out, and none of which even had goodreads pages til I added one for CodeX (with more pictures).

Spoilered due to being sort of NSFW:
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So this is Schmidt's last completed novel in 1975, the third of his three mega-works, Abend mit Goldrand, Evening Edged in Gold, the first of John E. Woods' Schmidt translations in 1980. It was hidden in the back of the fifth floor of the annex of the Bowdoin College Library in Brunswick, Maine, enormous, something like 24x14 inches (see the glasses for size), checked out only once since it was acquired, filled with even weirder layouts than School for Atheists. I have no idea where I'll ever see another copy of it, certainly not for long enough to actually read it.

One of the finest of surrealist storytellers. Essentially, you could make a case for near-completion by reading the two 1988 collections and both novels (as I have), but that still leaves whatever in Pigeon Vole may remain untranslated, Magical World of the Mayas, and the plays (I believe there's at least one more out there).