Unica Zürn (1916–1970)

I first came across this book on a strange list of novellas that had been compiled by an unknown person. Quite a few of the books on the list are dark in nature and this appeals to me. Some of them however are very hard to come by and as a result it took some time before I got my hands on a copy of this book at a price that was outrageous.

I knew nothing about the book or author going in and the start of the book contains an introduction. This introduction covers the author and the story, but since I did not want to spoil the book I skipped this and read it once I was finished with the story itself. From the outset, I should make it clear that this isn't a book suitable for minors or those who are of a more delicate disposition. There is a sexual assault among other things that makes this a hard read at times and I'm not easily put off.

The writing is very stripped down and sparse and I was left feeling as though I was a voyeur looking in on something horrible. The ending was fairly harrowing and it was made worse after reading what happened to Zurn not long after it was written. Despite all this I enjoyed reading this book as it stirred emotion and got a visceral reaction from me.… (mehr)

Full review here.

An excerpt:

The Trumpets of Jericho, when read alongside her other writings, demonstrates in fascinating detail how Zurn harnessed the principles of surrealism and the facts of her experience as a woman to produce what Svendsen refers to as “outsider art”. Zurn was treated throughout the 1960s for depressive and schizhophrenic episodes, before leaping out of a window to her death in 1970. Her novel Dark Spring is a foreshadowing of what was to come—the young girl narrator commits suicide in the same way at the book’s end. Dark Spring is unremittingly bleak, demonstrating just how much a young girl knows, and how much she absorbs from her immediate surroundings. It details the girl’s rape by her older brother (a fact which, too, appears to be autobiographical), but also the girl’s identification and infatuation with a distant and absent father. There are signs that the girl is repulsed by much of what she sees as the feminine body as symbolised by the figure of the mother; the maternal and the feminine combine to create an image that is at once suffocating and alienating. In Jericho, Zurn creates singular images of animals breaching the physical fortress of a castle, or tower, that the female character is in. As the ravens swarm in, the narrator says of the baby she is birthing, “Out of pride and a sense of justice, I cannot allow this hateful creature to smother me. I’d rather smother it first.”… (mehr)