Passages E-Book

Ann Quin

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 17

Beschreibung

A book of voices, landscapes and seasons, Ann Quin's newly republished novel mirrors the multiplicity of meanings of the very word 'passage' – of music, of time, and of life itself. A woman, accompanied by her lover, searches for her lost brother, who may have been a revolutionary, and who may have been tortured, imprisoned or killed. Roving through a Mediterranean landscape, they live out their entangled existences, reluctant to give up, afraid of the outcome. Reflecting the schizophrenia of its characters, the novel splits into alternating passages, switching between the sister and her lover's perspective. The lover's passages are also fractured, taking the form of a diary with notes alongside the entries. An intricate system of repetition and relation builds across the passages. 'All seasons passed through before the pattern formed, collected in parts.' Erotic and tense, in Quin's compelling third novel the author allowed her writing freer rein than before, and created a work ahead of its time: her most poetic, evocative and mysterious novel yet.

Leseprobe

iii

PASSAGES

Ann Quin

Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett

CONTENTS

Title PageIntroductionDedicationPassagesAbout the AuthorCopyright

v

INTRODUCTION

In his introduction to Ann Quin’s first novel, Berg (1964), Giles Gordon wrote ‘Here was a working-class voice from England quite unlike any other.’ What set her apart from the mainstream was that Quin eschewed the sort of gritty realist stuff being produced at the time by writers such as Arnold Wesker, John Braine and John Osborne – ‘they frankly stink’ said Quin, ‘with their dumb 19th century prose.’ Quite often writers with working-class origins are expected to write in a straight-up kind of way about the lives and struggles of working-class people, which does and should occur of course, though still not nearly enough of it finds its way to publication. It shouldn’t be presumed however that because your socio-economic situation is constrained, your interests and imagination don’t extend beyond it, envisioning alternative selfhoods and experiences. You’ll never not see inequality and disadvantage if that’s where you come from, believe me, and you’ll never stop feeling helplessly apoplectic about it. Being from a working-class background will always be a part of how you see and are seen in the world, but you might also realise that it needn’t define you, nor what you write about. That writing – exploring the complex relationships between language and experience and reality – can gradually and lastingly put forth a way of interpreting and being in the world that is quite indifferent to the ways allotted you by so-called class distinctions.

It occurred to me some time ago that growing up in a working-class environment may well engender an aesthetic sensibility that quite naturally produces work that is idiosyncratic, polyvocal, and apparently experimental. The walls are paper-thin; you rarely have any privacy. Neither do you have the safety nets, the buffers, nor the open doors which people from affluent backgrounds enjoy vi