A review by worstwitch
Guilty by Anna Kavan

5.0

Residual guilt that roots deep in childhood & suffocates you for ever after. The never-good-enough-i-don't-deserve-anything that Kavan captures so perfectly always. The personification of exterior objects that mirrors the interior mind-- the garden shrubs shaped into unrelenting chess figures & black, hard, shiny cars. I don't know how Kavan lived with her own mind-- always haunted / hunted without rest.

This passage here:
"Though I'm so eager to meet this being composed of all my past selves, the prospect frightens me, too. I'm afraid of the face I and other people may have given him or, worst of all, that he may be faceless. Once in imagination - or was it in reality? - I felt my inmost self dissolve and fall away from me. And lately I've developed a foolish trick of looking the other way when I pass a mirror, in case there should be no reflection there. To find that the personality I've been building up all my life was without a face would be the most appalling of all possible discoveries.
I'm quite prepared to meet the face of a criminal. I've known guilt all my life and been shunned and hated for it by my fellow creatures. In a sense, guilt has evolved me; without it, neither I nor my other self could exist. Not only is that self the criminal but the victim as well, the judge and, ultimately, the executioner. I can accept my guilt now that I recognize it as my own creation. We all of us construct our own world from what is within us, and this is the obvious reason why it's so vitally important to know what is there."