Staff Picks: Dorothy, Oz, and Arkansas

Anna Kavan

If a “beach read” is light and easy reading for the warm summer months, then Anna Kavan’s  is its cold-season equivalent, a book to complement the contemplative stillness of winter weather.  was recommended to me by a colleague, and I picked up (it was originally published in 1967). Like the fine intricacy of frost on a window, Kavan’s novel is hypnotically and delicately complex. The plot itself is deceptively simple: a nameless narrator seeks to rescue the object of his affection, the also nameless “glass girl,” from her abusive captor, referred to as “the warden.” The quest traverses a frozen apocalyptic landscape, and the structure of the hero’s journey is subverted by strange, hallucinatory scenes and shifts in narrative perspective. The hero’s antagonists are the totalitarian regimes and unrelenting frigid cold of his environment, but also the obsessive visions occurring in his mind. The introduction and afterword of this edition offer insight into the character of Kavan herself, and how the political and social allegories of the novel are layered find serious foothold in the preoccupations of today, and, much like the substance for which it is named, brilliant and blinding moments are refracted through clear, sharp prose. —