Impersonal Gardens

Machines in the Head by Anna Kavan. NYRB Classics, 2020, $15.95 paper.

BORN IN 1901 under the name Helen Woods (her parents were an affluent British couple living in France), the writer Anna Kavan took her nom de plume from a character that appeared in two of her early novels. The impression this adoption gives of fiction folding in on itself, of a mind doubling back and hiding in its own creations, is fitting. Kavan’s troubled biography, marked by regular bouts of debilitating mental illness and a lifelong though relatively controlled addiction to heroin, would become the wilted centerpiece of the fiction she’s best known for today, a violently dark and pessimistic breed of fable that seeks constantly to limn the inexpressible depths of mental anguish and social isolation.

Kavan’s stories, a broad selection of which have been brought together in , are tilted, aimless things. By and large they depict a world that is senseless, cruel, and narcotized beyond recognition. Untethered from any commitment to plot, Kavan’s stories often fall back on helpless acts of witnessing and