What a visceral depiction of human hell. This was like a mix of Sartre's No Exit and a Shirley Jackson story of domestic lockdown. ( )

Who Are You? shares themes with Anna Kavan’s well-known novel Ice but is written in a less abstract style. As in Ice (and some of Kavan’s other fiction), the focus is on a girl resigned to the desperation of her fate. She is trapped in a situation from which she sees no escape, living under the control of a warden-type husband. Instead of the creeping ice, there is the dripping oppressive heat of a tropical locale. The house is her prison. She is portrayed as the passive object of struggle between two male characters, Mr. Dog Head (her husband) and Suede Boots (another non-native 'businessman' much closer to her in age than Dog Head). The primary focus is on the dynamic between the girl and Dog Head, the latter who lives in perpetual simmering resentment of the former’s silence, which she in turn feels to be the required, and in fact, the only possible response to his despotic control. Kavan leaves the ending ambiguous, forcing the reader to consider whether the girl escapes and, if so, how and why, rather than serving up an expected outcome confirming the reader's possible prejudgment of the girl.

The detached narration, with its stage direction descriptions of the house and movements of its inhabitants, draws strong comparisons to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel La Jalousie, published a few years earlier. It’s hard to imagine Kavan not having been influenced by this work, which is also set in a tropical climate and concerned with the dynamic between a married woman, her husband, and a possible lover. The similarities between the two novels are striking, yet Kavan heads in a different direction than Robbe-Grillet. Her arrangement of plot is less overtly circuitous, though she does play with the reader’s understanding of certain events and outcomes. She also does not entirely avoid the third-person omniscient viewpoint, as Robbe-Grillet strove to do; the veil (mosquito net?) is lifted on occasion to reveal what is in the characters' heads. One could argue that this makes the book more readable in a conventional sense, but readers all maintain their own conventions for what is 'readable'. Recommended as an interesting companion read to both La Jalousie and Ice, but also as an alternate entry point than the latter to Kavan’s work.
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Having read [b:Ice|636223|Ice|Anna Kavan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328830578s/636223.jpg|622507] prior to this (oops, there's a review beckoning), when Kris suggested this to me I promptly dropped everything else (including Proust - sorry P - not to mention the other dozen books alternately languishing and luring on my currently-reading shelf) and plunged headlong into another Kavan world, this time one of intense, sweltering heat.

I'm not keen on rehashing a book but the setting and some of the events require mention here. I was a complete tabula rasa upon which the late Ms Kavan could paint her magic - from the opening pages I had imagined myself in either India or Pakistan with the descriptions of unrelenting monsoonal weather and invasive tropical flora and fauna and appropriately clad and inscrutable locals. That the book is set in Myanmar (Burma) I did not discover until emerging from the cocoon she had created, when I also read, during a few frenzied 'net searches, that she was a teenage bride married to a detested older man and living in Myanmar during the first year of her marriage; the semi-autobiographical patina that pervades the book and confirms, rather than informs, my reading.

If there is a fault with [b:Who Are You?|761586|Who Are You?|Anna Kavan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328830482s/761586.jpg|747679], it is that, in comparison with [b:Ice|636223|Ice|Anna Kavan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328830578s/636223.jpg|622507], Kavan has an agenda (not of itself a problem) which she fails to execute in the limpid, sleight-of-hand manner she achieves in her final book. The oppression of the surrounding jungle, the threatening storm, the conniving servants, are a reflection of the constraints in which she has placed the female protagonist and the male antagonist, and rather than reflect her as a feminist, actually seem to point at Kavan's own sense of failing to break free of the coercion, repression, and limitations imposed on women by society during Kavan's lifetime.

The female protagonist remains a victim, passive, despite the dual endings which hint at a potential escape, never chronicled, and the male antagonist is depicted as equally vengeful and oppressive in both of the (intimated but never fully realised) coup de grace. Indeed, the double denouement seems contrived, because there was very little variation in either motive or action for protagonist and antagonist, no emotional growth nor (even vague) resolution, hence I was left wondering: to what purpose? The re-written passages were fleeting and the questions in both alternatives at which Kavan hinted were answered with echoes. As a device, interesting, and yet perhaps telling, seeming to point towards Kavan's state of mind and perception of reality, her sense of (her lack of) freedom and choice, even though in the years that she wrote [b:Who Are You?|761586|Who Are You?|Anna Kavan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328830482s/761586.jpg|747679] she had attained some stability, autonomy, and identity of self.

While this may be contentious, I would also posit that Kavan lacks a 'modern feminist's' sensibilities, simply because 'feminist' is an anachronistic term deserving to be replaced by, as a suggestion, 'humanist'. Although the males in the book appear in multitude (there is only one other female who actually appears as opposed to being referenced), there is no male of substance or quality in the book - even the protagonist's 'saviour' is described in scathing, unflattering terms, without needing to be considered or presented as a knight in shining armor. Are all males so superficial, so irrelevant, so puerile, so controlling and aggressive or manipulative? This is not a balanced view of the genders, even if collectively, the one oppresses, with the collusion of the other.

The antagonist's 'aggressor' (not the protagonist's 'saviour') is also described brutally, and is, no less, a male of savage and barbarian demeanour. This vilification of the male gender is not, in this reader's opinion, a feminist perspective, if feminism is deemed to be about changing perception, power dynamics and status quo.

The prose is written in third person present tense and required a few pages to adjust. It is sublimely evocative, but there are instances where it descends into bludgeoning, the depiction of character serving to act as a mouthpiece for presenting the opportunity inherent in unbalanced (in the sense of power) relationships for misunderstanding, misinterpreting, and misreading of gestures and speech. Where the dialogue is sufficient, the insights into the characters apt, Kavan takes an unnecessary step further to compound the message that couples in extreme (almost surreal) circumstances behave perfectly rationally in an utterly absurd and grotesque manner.

[b:Who Are You?|761586|Who Are You?|Anna Kavan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328830482s/761586.jpg|747679] suffers in comparison with [b:Ice|636223|Ice|Anna Kavan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328830578s/636223.jpg|622507] only because the latter shows a maturation, an acceptance, a graphic illustration of entrapment in circumstances through choice and action, but withholds judgement on both protagonist and antagonist and even setting. [b:Who Are You?|761586|Who Are You?|Anna Kavan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328830482s/761586.jpg|747679] is no less worthy of being read, despite that lack of authorial distance.

Anna Kavan is a writer who I will be reading again, even if I commenced the journey with her magnum opus rather than her earlier works. I've yet to see a lesser-known (dead) author of the twentieth century more deserving of attention. ( )

Kavan's unique writing style is somewhere between night and day, dream and reality, madness and sanity, delerious and sober. This is her best work, with the setting and characters balanced perfectly and yet contrasted against each other. It is surprising that Kavan is not a better known writer in popular circles. ( )