Ann Quin (1936–1973)

Hair-tonic salesman Aly Berg, alias Greb, comes to a South Coast resort in the depths of winter to murder the father who abandoned him and his mother twenty-eight years earlier. The result is a strange, dark farce, obviously strongly inspired by Beckett, but with more than a hint of the Tony Hancock/Monty Python tradition (making copious use of props like a ventriloquist's dummy and a number of dead pets). There's so much confusion with the dummy that we — and Berg — lose track of whether the father is actually dead yet or whether it's the dummy that Berg has murdered yet again; when the actual murder does take place, it hardly seems significant any more.

Berg/Greb is clearly deep in Oedipus country, attracted to his father's repulsive girlfriend Judy and in love with his possessive offstage mother, but there's also a bizarre episode where he dresses up in Judy's clothes for no obvious reason and his father tries to make love to him, and various same-sex episodes hinted at in his past.

All very odd, but with a bouncy kind of energy that doesn't feel Beckettish at all, and full of unexpected language.
A good argument for not visiting Brighton (or wherever it is), perhaps, but also a good argument for reading more Quin.… (more)

What is more or less a simple plot--a woman accompanied by her lover--searching for her lost brother in a Mediterranean kind of landscape; that brother some kind of revolutionary (or not), with some sort of alias (or not), imprisoned (or not) and being tortured (or not) or even worse--dead (or not). Having said that though the plot of the story is really almost secondary to a stream of conscious kind of imagistic prose that really subsumes all the elements of the plot into a kind of undercurrent of the novel itself. What it seems at times to be is almost hundreds upon hundreds of snapshots one following another almost in corelation to one word following another. There is a precision to the language used here that seems to multiply almost generically upon itself seeming to create new images with practically every single word. There are resemblances (at least to me) to some of the French new novel writers (particularly Robbe-Grillet) but I think Ann Quin goes further and in a sense her work here is more easily accessible than most of those writers. It often alternates between voice of sister, voice of her lover (who is a kind of protector, a guide sometimes--who is confused himself sometimes about why he is helping her) within sentence and paragraph structure changing from one to the other without cue--giving it the sense of schizophrenia or fragmentation that the blurb on the back of the book talks about. Very erotic in nature with some elements of a mystery or a thriller--the plot is ultimately left unresolved--much like a dream.… (more)