The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments by Ann Quin

The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments Reviews

• 
  Hugh

  My eye was caught by the Guardian's review of this book back in January
  here, which intrigued me - Quin was a British experimental novelist who died young in 1973 and has since been largely forgotten, but she has some distinguished admirers. This collection brings together various short stories and other pieces, plus the 50 pages of the novel she was working on when she died, which gives the collection its title.
  
  The collection is stylistically varied. Some of the early pieces are raw and visceral, often written in short fragmentary sentences. Others are harder to decrypt and (dare I say it) have aged less well. The subject matter includes childhood memories, sexuality and mental illness, and there is never any sentimentality. I found the collection surprisingly readable for experimental fiction, but I am not sure how much will remain in the mind. I would be interested in tracking down at least one of Quin's four published novels.
• 
  Nate D

  Ann Quin is one of the great 20th century experimentalists bridging modernism and post-modernism over a series of increasingly brilliant novels over the decade of 1964 - 1973 prior to her untimely death. As such, it's unbelievable that we had to wait until this year to get a collection of he short fiction into print. It's all here: surreal beachscapes, drearily perceptive investigations into everyday life (of middling love affairs, of the struggling writer), ghost-written monologues, whiplash-inducing cut-up experiments, an early form of her masterpiece Tripticks, and, at last, a surviving fifty page fragment of her great unfinished 5th novel, the real treasure here. A subjective asylum story in the best tradition of Nerval, Kavan, Carrington, and Zurn, this one burns with the candid particulars of a personal fragmentation of reality, and, worse, the inability of others to really care or attempt to ai the sufferer outside of the check boxes of lingering-sense-of-responsibility or institutional bare minimums. As such, chilling. And with that, a great close to 2017.
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  Quin’s incomplete novel, the titular piece published here, is one of her most remarkable prose works: a startling autobiographical exploration of a psychiatric collapse, set in an institution similar to the various she attended in her last troubled years. The remaining stories showcase her unquiet and skittish creative mind, the strongest (for me) the stories that share the bleak interiority of her first novel Berg. ‘Nude and Seascape’ is an unsettling story featuring a man burying a female corpse, and ‘A Double Room’ captures a miserable attempt at a torrid affair ruined by impotence, the latter one of Quin’s funnier pieces, and ‘Eyes That Watch Behind the Wind’ is a lyrical story set in Mexico featuring a more lucid form of abstract writing. The less successful fragments are the cut-up stories ‘Tripticks’ (later her last novel), ‘Living in the Present’ and some strange blips written for an artist boyfriend. Her prose is often abstruse to the point reading for pleasure becomes a chore, such as in ‘Ghostworm’ or ‘Never Trust a Man Who Bathes with His Fingernails’, two inscrutable pieces where the staccato sentences and minglings of narrator and character rarely produce any notable effect. Two self-portraits ‘Leaving School — XI’ and ‘One Day in the Life of a Writer’ offer a brief peep into Quin’s personality, something that remains elusive and mercurial across her strange and blackly comic writings.
• 
  Lee

  Largely fascinating and enjoyable (always fascinating; not always enjoyable). At times the fragments are impossible to reconfigure in comprehensible shapes, and I think I prefer the slightly-warped version of Quin, rather than the aggressively avant garde (Isabel Waidner has, I would guess, definitely read this). But there are some unmissable pieces here, the brilliant and horrible A Double Room and the following, which show you the kind of conditions in which Quin was expected to work, and possibly partly illustrate how those unique and peerless sentences were formed, under threat at all times from myriad interruptions and money worries and the thing she eventually had enough of, Life.
  
  
  
  'ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF A WRITER
  
  Woke up from dream of my publisher handing me a cheque, to the post—letter from my publisher regret Arts Council have refused a grant, no reason given… That’s ’cos they read what I did with the last one. Ah well on to a passable crap. Retreat into ex-tenant’s room to write, confronted by a little heap of dust, bugs, etc., landlady has brushed up, cursing I put into dustpan to the sound of ‘do you want some coffee now or later are you warm enough in there what do you want for lunch there’s kippers, lamb stew, eggs or bacon or…?’. Close door and confront blank paper in typewriter. Look at some notes made from Harry Guntrip’s book on Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self. ‘Patients become inaccessible emotionally, when the patient seems to be bodily present but mentally absent.’ ‘I went down into a tower and then had to go through a tunnel to get out. Though I had come in that way I was horrified.’ ‘The symptoms were a defence against guilt and depression about his hostility to his mother. He was orally dependent on her. In this connexion it is significant that he sucked his thumb all his life.’ I start my round of oral masturbation with a cigarette. Window cleaner props ladder outside and stares in. Re-start novel; finally get the tone right, decide that’s the most important part of it all: the tone.
  
  Lunch. Walkies along the Front with Mother. We sit down. ‘Look at that it looks like a Martian look he’s coming to get you—’ Umhhhh? A large piece of shitty paper bounces along. ‘Oh God he’s coming to sit next to us come on dear let’s move.’ Ummhhh? ‘No thank God he’s decided to sit next to them.’
  
  Library—practically empty except for the section I want. The usual eccentric-looking fraternity gathered around the Psychology section.
  
  Open a book on Hostility and read ‘You can guess what happened, if you do not already know. In the wee hours of the morning Stretch would tiptoe to the door of the guest room, open it ever so softly, and peek in, just to make sure. You can also guess what he saw and what utter consternation seized him at finding his guest either too short or too long—never a perfect fit. And now, knowing how it was that Stretch was trying so hard to be a perfect host, it is quite easy to see that next he simply had to do what he did.’
  
  Back along the Front where Bergy men furtively walk, sit, spit and mutter. Back home and nice tea dear. Start decorating and spend most of the time wiping off emulsion drops from parquet flooring, burn hole in carpet from cigarette, burn hole in table lampshade. Give up in despair and foul temper. Back to writing the tone is all wrong. I’m no longer capable of writing that’s why the Arts Council—they know you know. Watch tele. Watch myself watching and being watched by Mother in between her sleep, and hear her shudder as an old woman comes on. And so to bed.'
  
  
• 
  S̶e̶a̶n̶

  
  Ann Quin is one of my favorite writers, and while I won't go so far as to say this collection disappointed me, it certainly did not measure up to the high bar set by her novels (nor should I have expected it to). While the word 'fragments' in the subtitle held a certain allure when I first saw it, in truth the word 'fragments' here refers to literal fragments, as in unfinished, probably unintentionally so, having not ever been published (and perhaps not ever intended to have been). This gets at the issue of posthumous publication, about which I am a perpetual fence-sitter. In Quin's case, of course, there was very little published during her lifetime, outside of her four novels. It was almost inevitable then, given the recent (minor) resurgence of interest in her work, that a collection such as this would appear.
  
  The centerpiece here is Quin's unfinished manuscript for her fifth novel The Unmapped Country, the majority of which was previously published in Giles Gordon's anthology
  Beyond the Words. The missing piece, which comes at the end, is a powerful segment, leaving one to wonder why it wasn't also included in the anthology. With Gordon's book long out of print, the return of this novel fragment to print is what makes publication of this collection so important and worthwhile. It follows the experience of a young woman named Sandra during her harrowing time spent in a psychiatric ward, and offers a scathing critique of this type of so-called mental health care, where patients are warehoused, doped up, and micromanaged like a herd of docile farm animals. The closing section is Sandra's first-person immersive narrative describing an extended event of fractured reality permeated by paranoia.

  Let her think I'm mad, let them all think that, so readily they will claim their superiority over fear.

  I found the stories that round out the collection to be hit or miss. One entitled 'Tripticks', is clearly the basis for her novel of the same name, which happens to be the one book of hers that didn't appeal much to me. 'Nude and Seascape' is a particularly strong example of Quin's abilities tangential to the quasi-horror, weird genre. Others in the collection also align either with this type, or a related neo-Gothic type, with varying degrees of success. The first four in the collection were probably my favorites, and within these is what feels to me like the most thinly autobiographical of Quin's writing. However, this is not a quality I see in her novels, and in fact these stories felt more like a writer finding her voice, one which would mature into the one found in her novels. At odds with my impression, though, are the source notes, which indicate most of the stories appear to have been written concurrently with the novels.
  
  I would not recommend this book to readers unfamiliar with Quin. If anything, it's probably left unread until one has fully explored her novels and obtained a greater understanding of her themes and stylistic preoccupations. I'm giving it four stars, but most of that is for The Unmapped Country. The rest of the collection rates more like a three.

  The long night stretched out. Wind rattled the windows, and snow mixed with hail pounded like small fists against glass. In the middle of the dormitory, a nurse read or slept under a lamp. Sandra stared at this light until it spun from its orbit and approached. Right at the very beginning - but there was no beginning. Vague notes for the basis of a shape. The first section interrupted by the last. No continuous movement. A starting point somewhere. Chord superimposed on chords. The pendulum swung back.
• 
  Adam

  Elusive, challenging, inchoate. On my map, it's like Beckett by way of Burroughs. The style throughout, except for the title story, is comprised mostly of very short omnidirectional outbursts, shuffling dialogue, thought, description, narration, and commentary without any overt indications. The cover art is apt, although it reads rougher around the edges. And most of the time it works well. There is a frenzied sense of desperation, of visceral struggle to give it form before time runs out and it vanishes forever. I am left wanting more and hoping I can find it in her novels. It seems like she was only beginning to find her voice.
• 
  Paige

  misc. thoughts as review:
  
  i was pleasantly surprised by this collection of ann quin's unpublished writing. this being my first time reading her, i feel that the comparison to kathy acker and especially chris kraus on the back is merely marketing - her greatest similarities to the above are being a female, experimental writer. quin's writing is certainly not the schizoid, cut-up raw red cunt-ness of acker and none of the self conscious art-writing-theory-fiction-gossip of kraus. firstly, foremostly i suspect for anyone reading, quin's reading feels inescapably british, lending it a more provincial air, hardly susceptible to any of the rock n roll mythos of kraus/acker and decidedly weirder.
  
  last year, i saw jennifer hodgson, the editor of this book, speak at housmans alongside anne boyer. one of the labels that is frequently used to describe ann quin is as a working class writer. boyer read her poem 'not writing' from garments against women alongside quin' alongside quin's 'one day in the life of a writer', try doing this too if you like. one of the special things about quin's writing is that it's flowing, surrealism is never entirely detached from the confines of the world - work, money, rent, aspirational middle class manners, parents - that shape it. this is a writing that perhaps confesses something without failing to confess a key secret to the world of so much feminist-experimental-writing, the class antagonisms and struggles that define the world - often present in as much of the awkward english parochialism evident in the stories 'a double room' and 'every cripple has his own way of walking'.
  
  for me, this really all came together with the titular piece, quin's unfinished novel, 'the unmapped country'. this story appears to be drawn mostly on quin's own experience with madness or something akin to 'psychosis' (not that she ever describes it in any such clinical way, allowing us to experience the imaginative richness, beauty, and anxiety of an 'episode') and psychiatric institutions. this rings true with my own experience in hospital way more than anything i've read before. even reading this is quite sad as even in the unglamorous account of an NHS psychiatric ward, it's clear that austerity has taken a massive toll and stripped even the meagre resources available to people in these glorified psychiatric prisons.
  
  'as a chicanx' (ack), let it be my duty to say that the story, 'eyes that watch the wind' is as full of cringing discomfort (totally unintentional) that you would expect from a british writer 'exploring' rural mexico and finding herself outside the capital with indigenous people. like replete with that oh-so relatable annoyance at all the brown noisiness and undercurrent of anxiety about the threat posed by local men. i would probably describe quin as a 'psychological' writer, unflinching etc. etc. but the limits of this can start to show when we leave england to a territory where the writer knows her antagonisms much less well than she thinks.
• 
  RobPalindrome

  Vivid, surreal and hallucinatory. Beautiful and haunting. Some pieces are certainly a lot better than others, but as a whole this book merits repeat visits.
  
  Thank you for making this available And Other Stories!
• 
  Terry Pitts

  While some writers seek to find their voice, Ann Quin seemed to have a need to explore voices. Her narrators and main characters are female, male, children, passive, angry, feminist, conservative, well off, working class. In these fourteen fragments, only some of which have been published before, we can see Quin pushing further and further into an “unmapped country” of writing. Written over a brief period of something like seven years between 1966-1973, at least four of the stories in The Unmapped Country are jaw-droppingly powerful, each in their own Quin-quirky way: “A Double Room,” “”Every Cripple Has His Own Way of Walking,” “Never Trust a Man who Bathes with his Fingernails,” and The Unmapped Territory.” (And how about Quin’s titles?)
  
  But my favorites are these three. “A Double Room” is a devastating story of a woman alternately struggling to/refusing to come to terms with her loneliness and her need/hatred for men. In “Eyes That Watch Behind the Wind,” an Englishwoman and an American man traveling through Mexico attend a bullfight—”the meeting place of challenge”—which becomes a description of their tense, tenuous relationship. In "The Unmapped County," we first meet Sandra, she is being treated in a mental institution, locked in a daily battle with uncaring doctors and nurses, psychiatrists who make no real effort to understand their patients, and dismal living conditions. In the story's second part we watch Sandra’s unraveling mind and her relationship with Clive, a painter whose days as her boyfriend are numbered.
  
  For a much longer review, check out
  my blog.
• 
  John Conway

  ‘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.’ Tom McCarthy
  
  
  http://www.andotherstories.org/book/t...
• 
  Taylor Napolsky

  Fantastic. I think this is what literature is supposed to do when it’s at its best. Some of these stories just tore my heart in half.
  
  If you like edgy, experimental fiction that is (mostly) readable, this is for you.
  
  This other review I read for this said (and I completely agree) this is how we rewrite history—basically lifting up women writers who, so undeservingly, haven’t gotten near the acclaim or rep they ought to have.
• 
  Meg Tuite

  Pure brilliance! Some quotes:
  "The scream moved up into the lump. A fist thrust in her throat. Spread out. The scream emerged in a coughing bout."
  "Waves of blackness swallowed up the houses."
  "Suburbs crawled in and out."
  
  I am enamored. LOVE the movement of her language. Will read everything she wrote!
• 
  Denzil

  Some really very good pieces in here, lots of differing styles of writing some more experimental some quite straight but always with a sense of conflict between what is going on in the head and that in the outside world. Will read one of her novels soon.
• 
  Craig

  The first of Quinn's books I have managed to get a hold of, and I will preface this review with the acknowledgment that that was my mistake. This is a collected work of much of her early and/or unfinished work - and as such I imagine it is of most interest to the completist, who wants to trace her stylistic influences. This runs the gamut from (to my mind) relatively unsuccessful experimentations with avant-garde writing forms of the 1960s ('Living in the Present' seemed particularly exhausting) to some of the more stylistically conventional but haunting 'seaside noirs' of 'Nude and Seascape' and 'A Double Room' - which I thoroughly enjoyed and which suggest I might have done better starting with her novel Berg. Other personal highlights included 'Ghostworm', 'Motherlogue', 'Never Trust a Man Who Bathes With His Fingernails', and 'Tripticks'.
• 
  Owen Knight

  Ann Quin was an experimental novelist who died aged 37 in 1973. This collection brings together fragments of her work, including part of an unfinished novel. Many of the stories are written in a staccato style, with clipped sentences and no punctuation marks for direct speech. This can give the writing a certain urgency but, reading the whole collection together, it becomes repetitive.
  The stories are often original in their content and are told unemotionally.
  An interesting introduction, although I don't think I have the stamina to read one of her novels.
• 
  Guido Eekhaut

  The stories are not actually stories, not in the classical sense, but fragments of a life, fragments of a reality. Quin is a cult figure, and as such has worked in the margin. This book rightfully brings to our attention some of her shorter material, which lacks a bit of coherence but is nevertheless an excellent intro to her writing.
• 
  Augustus Jasmin

  I learned about Ann Quin recently from an author's note in JG Ballard's "Atrocity Exhibition." Coincidentally, it appears the cult British author's work is in the process of being reprinted This year. This rarities collection is pretty interesting, but I'm looking forward to getting my hands on her signature novel, "Berg."
• 
  Heather

  It's tough to review a collection that's partially finished, but this book had flashes of pure genius, and was 100 times more entertaining than many of the overhyped short story collections I've read in the past couple of years. Standout stories were Motherlogue and the one about the mermaid on the beach.
• 
  Branka

  Vivid, rich, full on....brilliant!
  
• 
  Boo

  A difficult read. Bits of it are fantastic and Nude and Seascape is worth the read but its not an easy book. Do not pack this on your holidays!
• 
  Lucy 💘

  2.5/5 stars
• 
  ines

  the unmapped country is <3
• 
  Kathleen Creedon

  This book was kind of funky and wonderful. I discovered Quin after I tried to find any Djuna Barnes titles at my library (there aren't any!!), but the search feature suggested this compilation of short stories and fragments instead.
  
  Ann Quin is a British writer who was a relatively unspoken part of the experimental literary movement of the '60s. She died by suicide just a few years after she wrote this, following a lifetime of mental illness and distress (this collection over previously unread works was published posthumously in 2018). I normally skip intros to books (sue me), but I decided to read this one since I was going into it with know idea who she was or what kind of stuff she wrote, and it was illuminating. I think this book must be the prototype for auto fiction because it's partially autobiographical, though intertwined with some chaotic and near-nonsensical short stories. It's a little disorienting.
  
  Though after her death she has received generous praise from *some* authors/her contemporaries, she is largely forgotten, but she's revolutionary !!! Truly a whole new reading experience, unlike other experimental or avant-garde works I've read, and it all feels so natural. She really shines through it, which is a nice sort of memorial to her. She worked job to job, lived paycheck to paycheck and experienced severe depression, anxiety and even electroshock therapy before she died in 1973.
  
  I'd recommend this for anyone who's a big poetry read, who's bored with reading the same old stuff or who is interested in the intersection of mental illness and art.
  
  Another fun thing is that she describes Catholic school in the most perfect way: A ritualistic culture that gave me a conscience. A death wish and a sense of sin. Also a great lust to find out, experience what evil really was.
• 
  Deborah Siddoway

  As ever, I find it difficult to review a book of short stories, because each story is unique, different, and says something distinct. They are each their own entity, yet grouped together, to make a kind of whole - a disconcerting one at that.
  
  To start with I have to say that I had never come across Ann Quin before. In fact, I cannot recall ever hearing her name. I think that, by itself, says much about the way in which female voices from the past are lost, because her writing, experimental, brave, searing and honest, was a revelation.
  
  The story that stood out for me was Nude and Seascape. It was profoundly disturbing, offering an immersive read into a series of events I could never quite grasp the context of, but at the same time, knowing that the context was entirely irrelevant. It was a visceral, worrying, menacing read, but intriguing.
  
  A Double Room was almost painful to read, layered with sadness, exploitation and loneliness. This too, was quite unsettling to read.
  
  All in all, with the obvious disclaimer that some of the stories, or the fragments of stories, are better than others, I delighted in Quin's very unusual style. Motherlogue was revelatory, and it reminded me of Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport, but on a microscopic scale.
  
  This is one book I would recommend for lovers of literary fiction and experimental writing. I will definitely be looking up Quin's novels and adding to my to be read pile.
• 
  Helena

  An uneven collection of short stories and fragments. The sharp and clipped tone of the sentences suit some pieces of which 'Leaving School - XI', 'Nude and Seascape', 'A Double Room' and 'One day in the Life of a Writer' are the most effective. Two pieces ('B.B.'s Second Manifesto' and 'Untitled') ghostwritten for a boyfriend feel quite dated now in their use of 60s tropes. The rest, a mix of cut-up style and esoteric/abstract writing, do not seem to be going anywhere in particular. Of these, 'The Unmapped Country', Quin's final and unfinished novel, is an evocation of her experiences in psychiatric institutions, which I personally found cliched in places and, overall, a bit of task to get through.