Berg

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One of Britain’s most adventurous post-war writers. Psychologically dark and sexually daring.’ Juliet Jacques 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 A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .’ And with that iconic opening line, Ann Quin’s remarkable debut novel Berg hits the ground running and never lets up. On its release it catapulted Quin to the forefront of British avant-garde writing, and almost 60 years later it has lost none of its revolutionary power. Quin draws on detective and pulp fiction for the scaffolding of the Oedipal tale of a man trying to murder his father, from which her radical approach to stream-of-consciousness prose spirals out into a swirling synaesthetic state of delirium. Berg is funny and grotesque, hilarious and frightening all at once. In its dream-like portrayal of the collapsing mental state of its protagonist, it echoes the work of Anna Kavan, whilst Quin’s sharp eye for social satire and brutal wit recalls her contemporary Rosemary Tonks. But really, Berg is like nothing else, a step beyond the experimental mental states described by William Burroughs or the impressionism of James Joyce. A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.

Writing (and reading, and thinking, and being, for that matter) are such private, self-enclosed acts, I’m not sure how you extrude “real” flesh-and-blood people and places from any of them, and vice versa. But I think that might be what’s most interesting about the project. Quin was so concerned with trying to lay herself bare, trying to struggle out of her own skin and find a way to communicate directly, with all the difficulties of knowing other people and yourself – and any book about her life and work should reflect this most of all, I think. 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. Quin’s prose is as sharp as a deadly blade, flashing between light and dark with arresting effect.’ Edwin TurnerThe novel is written in a kind of internal monologue by Berg/Greb, which mingles description, speech, and thoughts, without clearly distinguishing them, and filtering everything through the central character's viewpoint. [1] Much of the novel takes place under the influence of alcohol, which adds to the confusing, dream-like atmosphere. However, Quin also includes elements of British spy fiction and the crime novel, in the melodramatic way the son stakes out his father's flat and tries to kill the old man; Giles Gordon detected the influence of Graham Greene. [1] Reception [ edit ] While it is true that Quin has no time for conventional morality or prudery, this interpretation can be hard to square with the depictions of sex in her novels, where examples of liberating or affirming or even satisfactory sexual relations are conspicuously absent. Her work evinces no trace of naive hippie idealism. To the extent that her social consciousness is entangled with the carnal, it would seem to be fatally entangled. The pursuit of pleasure is always understood to be twinned with the good-old death drive. Quin invariably portrays desire as an uneasy dance between attraction and repulsion, dominance and submission. In the short story “Nude and Seascape,” Quin gives us a morbid satire on the objectifying male gaze, in which a man drags a woman’s naked corpse around a beach, trying to find the most visually pleasing arrangement. Eventually, he decapitates her. Despite ongoing rumours of a BS Johnson revival, I feel our attention could be more usefully directed towards Ann Quin.’ Stewart Home, in 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess Ha – good question. I have no idea how to write a biography. I mean, I’m not even sure what one is, but I know that one way that people go at it is to follow in their subject’s wake, to go to the places they went and through that try to commune with them in some way. Now, I have to admit, I find all of that a bit suspect. Whenever I’m in a place some eminent person, or a person I admire, has been, for sure I get a little charged feeling of proximity, but it’s a proximity that’s all about distance, about the impossibility of collapsing time and overlaying the scene with you in it with the scene with them in it. When I go to places with blue plaques, which I don’t very often, I find myself sort of morbidly more interested in what’s left of the person’s body than in traces of their consciousness, more interested in who the dust and the greasy smudges belong to.

Exuberance and humanity blossom from Quin's prose, which is also very funny . . . Although you can detect Virginia Woolf’s legacy here, there is a contemporary truth about Quin’s work, a desire to dwell in her own experiences.’ Lucy Scholes Three (Calder & Boyars, 1966; Dalkey Archive, 2005; And Other Stories, 2020, ISBN 978-1-911508-84-7) She is one of our greatest ever novelists. Ann Quin’s was a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before: it was artistic, modern, and – dare I say it – ultimately European.' Danielle Dutton A grimy little tale of shame, body horror and Freudian perversity set in the 60s on the seedy south coast. The memorable opening line doesn’t mess about: “A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.” Probably the only straightforward sentence in the whole text - it’s endlessly perplexing after that.In her teens she grew interested in drama, joining a theatre company for a short-lived stint as an assistant stage manager. She applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but experienced severe stage fright when faced with the prospect of auditioning and soon gave up any hopes for the stage, though dramatic performance and ritual inform most of her novels in terms of both form and content. 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.”’ Progressing with the potency of a fever dream, this reissue invites readers to discover Quin’s remarkable voice.’ Danielle Dutton