4/15/2023 0 Comments Quin bookz![]() Then no sound, all suddenly would be soundless, treading softly, dividing rocks with fins, and sword-fish fingers plucking away clothes, that were left with your anatomy, huddled like ruffled birds waiting. Conscious of sound, gulls hovering, crying, or silent at rarer intervals, their swift turns before being swallowed by the waves. ‘You castle-bound, spying on princesses, honey-gold, singing against the blue, if touched surely their skin would ooze? Aware of own smell, skin-texture, sun in eyes, lips, toes, the softness underneath, in between, wondering what miracle made you, the sky, the sea. And the story is told in a rather opaque style, with speech mark-less and unattributed direct speech mixed in with stream-of-consciousness brooding as well as more conventional descriptions of, at times almost farcical, action, and with prose that switches from the grubby to the lyrical and back again. The other key character is Brighton itself, recognisable from landmarks but transformed into something eerie and dream-like yet at the same time earthy and sordid, the sea a menacing presence, and the town mainly populated, in the winter season with tourists long gone, by a disturbing and depraved group of tramps. A budgie and a cat are some of the collateral casualties of the escalating violence resulting from the seedy love triangle between son, roguish father and the flirtatious middle-aged lover of both. Berg finds himself becoming infatuated with his father’s younger lover, and confused, when pursuing his planned vengeance, between the old man and a tailor’s dummy his father apparently uses in a vaudeville act, which at different times is mistaken for a Bonfire Night Guy and a dead body. ![]() Concealing his identity by the simple expedient of changing his name to Greb, he takes up lodgings in a room next door to his father’s, fully intending to commit patricide.īut a tangled tale follows. The story has Alistair (‘Aly’) Charles Humphrey Berg, born 1931, a young and rather unsuccessful hair-tonic salesman, coming to Brighton where he has tracked down his scoundrel of a father, who he last saw, when he was a child, 28 years ago. A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father.Īnd Other Stories 2018 publication of The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments has refocused attention on experimental British novelist Ann Quin, who committed suicide in 1973 aged just 37, who was best known for her 1964 debut Berg. ![]()
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