Eagles' Nest

'Her preoccupations - opioid addiction, extreme weather, female oppression, psychopathology - have become topics of burning interest. And a growing appetite for expressionist techniques and hybrid forms - and for a submerged tradition of postwar English modernism - suggests that literary culture is on her side.' -- Leo Robson * The New Yorker *
'Kavan has built a cult following, with all that phrase implies. Her fans, who have included Anaïs Nin, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, Jonathan Lethem, and Patti Smith, are scarce yet passionate. "Few novelists," declared Ballard, "match the intensity of her vision."' -- Emma Garman * The Paris Review *
'Eagle's Nest (1957) has been called Kavan's most Kafkaesque work, further developing her concept of a "second secret existence," a real world with an underworld percolating beneath. ... Kavan only received true recognition for her genius a year before her death, with the success of Ice.' -- Kate Zambreno
'De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister.' -- Brian Aldiss
'Anna Kavan explored the nocturnal worlds of our dreams, fantasies, imagination, and nonreason.' -- Anaïs Nin
In Eagles Nest (1957), a luckless paranoiac takes a train from a city in the "grip of an iron frost" to a place under a "blazing sun" where everything was "arid, inhuman, enormous and elemental, like a scene from some earlier stage of the planet's long life." In this new authorial persona, Kavan committed fully to the literary style only nascent in her previous work: hallucinatory, experimental, steeped in doom, and with a disorientating quality made all the more forceful by diamond-etched prose and supreme narrative control and concision. ... 'Astonishingly avant-garde even to the contemporary reader, Kavan knew that what she called "my sort of experimental writing" had narrow appeal, but she wasn't interested in conforming to popular taste. Despite criticism and rejection, she remained uncompromising in her creative vision.' for this most imaginative and otherworldly of writers, whose plots seamlessly merge fantasy and reality, past and future, life and death, nothing could be more apt than a cross-century literary resurrection. -- Emma Garman * Paris Review *