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BITS AND BOOKS ............................... BOOK REVIEW: ANN QUIN MAPPING THE UNMAPPABLE Ann Quin came of age in a <strong>Brighton</strong> where Mods and Rockers fought each other on the beach, The Who played The Florida Rooms, and the Jay Twins were wowing Sussex University. But Quin was interested in a very different sort of Modernist. Born in 1936 into a working class household, brought up by her mother, she became part of a wave of writers who looked back to Joyce, Woolf and Beckett, and across the Channel to the French nouveau Roman. Quin published four novels in her short lifetime. These were Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). Her writing allowed her to travel widely, and she counted two American poets – Robert Creeley and Robert Sward – amongst her lovers. But she was troubled by mental illness and walked into the sea near the Palace Pier during the first Bank Holiday weekend of August 1973 and drowned herself. She was 37. Her writing is experimental, but always accessible, and Jennifer Hodgson is to be applauded for going to great lengths to assemble The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments, a collection of her short prose, tracking down pieces in obscure magazines, anthologies, and private holdings. Quin couldn’t have asked for a more diligent and perceptive editor. The book starts with a short memoir, Leaving Home – XI. Quin’s opening sentences – staccato fragments – hint at what’s to come: ‘Bound by perverse securities in a convent, RC <strong>Brighton</strong> for eight years. Taking that long to get over… I was not a Catholic.’ There’s humour too, but it’s dark and biting: ‘I sold my soul to the devil… I won a poetry prize. The devil had obviously accepted my offer.’ When her breakthrough comes it brings no relief: ‘…I had to face the world again, and the problems of being published. The proofs finally arrived, I couldn’t open them, and spent the whole day vomiting from anxiety and depression.’ As Hodgson comments, ‘Quin is often drawn to experiences of difference, extremity and disorientation.’ Nowhere is this more evident than in the long unfinished title piece, The Unmapped Country, which reads like the first fifty pages of a novel. Sandra is in a mental hospital, where reality is dislocated but capable of yielding a kind of cracked poetry all the same: ‘The snow made points of whiteness in the dark, and the stars reflected their points, but no longer did they charge her pulse; the transmission had been cut off.’ This piece is as idiosyncratic and powerful as Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but without the macho shenanigans of Randle P McMurphy. Other standout pieces include Nude and Seascape, a surreal murder story; Every Cripple Has His Own Way of Walking, a dark contemporary fairy story; and Motherlogue, a hilariously grim transcription of phoning a mother that Larkin would have known well. This collection further enhances Quin’s reputation, and is the most striking book I’ve read this year. Modernists everywhere should get it. John O’Donoghue The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments, Ann Quin, ed. Jennifer Hodgson, And Other Stories, £10 Photo by Oswald Jones (from the Larry Goodell collection) ....29....