Berg

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In a miserable out-of-season seaside resort, Alistair Berg is planning to kill his estranged alcoholic father whilst taking a fancy to his dad’s new fake-fur consort. So we have vaguely oedipal goings-on – all communicated in Ann Quin’s slightly demented yet often effective prose – but with a narrative demoted from tragedy to farce, and characters demoted from archetypes to stereotypes. Loraine Morley, “The Love Affair(s) of Ann Quin,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, vol.5, no.2 (1999).

Spanning the author’s entire career, The Unmapped Country builds up a portrait of the artist as a restless spirit, forever adventuring into the unknown. The diversity on display is impressive . . . her work is as open-ended as those sentences she regularly produced that trail off into silence, casting a spell instead of spelling out; floating away on their reserve of potentiality.’ Ben Lawrence A man named Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father…Alistair Berg es un vendedor de tónicos para el pelo que alberga un odio acérrimo por su padre que los abandonó a él y a su madre cuando era pequeño. Berg, que decide buscar a su padre y matarlo, lo encuentra en un pueblo de la costa y hasta allí se traslada alquilando la habitación contigua a la suya en una casa de huéspedes. Para camuflarse se cambia el nombre por el de Greb. Con la única separación de un tabique, Berg es testigo de la vida que hay al otro lado, habitación que su padre comparte con su joven amante, Judith. Berg se convierte en un voyeur continuo con todo lo que esto implica también para su imaginación. Su desemedido odio a su padre planea uno y mil métodos para quitarlo de en medio y durante las ausencias de su padre traba relación con Judith, con todo lo que esto implica también.

The novel is structured as a process of unveiling. Both Leonard and Ruth seem intent on discovering the motivations behind S’s death. As the narrative progresses, revealing the hollowness of Leonard and Ruth’s relationship and calling into question Leonard’s assertion that no one can be blamed “least of all ourselves,” we are exposed to documents that claim to reveal the past: tape recordings of S speaking, excerpts from her diaries, excerpts from Leonard’s and Ruth’s diaries as well. After her death in 1973 at only 37, Ann Quin’s star first dipped beneath the horizon, disappearing from view entirely, before rising slowly but persistently, to the point that it’s now attaining the septentrional heights it always merited. I suspect that she’ll eventually be viewed, alongside BS Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter.’ Lee RourkeI suspect it's probably just me. I think I've read too much "kitchen sink"-type writing from the era - The L-Shaped Room, Osborne, Wesker and all the rest. Additionally, I seem to have read a number of novels about humdrum putative murderers and murderees ( Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, The Driver's Seat, London Fields, etc.). All of these came after Berg, of course. Had I read Quin's book in 1964, I may well have been more taken with it. More recently Berg has been praised for introducing to British fiction the techniques of the European experimental novel, the nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. [2] However at the time of Berg, it is not clear if Quin had read any of their writing. [1] Writer Lee Rourke has variously called it "one of the great British novels", [3] "beautiful", "dark, esoteric, haunting", and "the best novel ever set in Brighton". [2] It may well be that this was Ann Quin’s bleak vision: life is an unfunny pantomime peopled by lifeless stereotypes in dreary surroundings. But, if true, it’s not much of a recipe for an interesting novel. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.