Dark Spring

by Unica Zürn, Caroline Rupprecht (Translator)

Dark Spring is an autobiographical coming-of-age novel that reads more like an exorcism than a memoir. In it author Unica Zurn traces the roots of her obsessions: The exotic father she idealized, the "impure" mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described "the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood." Dark Spring is the story of a young girl's simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness, revealing a different aspect of the "mad love" so romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists. Unica Zurn (1916-1970) emigrated in 1953 from her native Berlin to Paris in order to live with the artist Hans Bellmer. There she exhibited drawings as a member of the Surrealist group and collaborated with Bellmer on a series of notorious photographs of her nude torso bound with string. In 1957, a fateful encounter with the poet and painter Henri Michaux led to the first of what would become a series of mental crises, some of which she documented in her writings. She committed suicide in 1970--an act foretold in this, her last completed work.

Genres: Fiction, German Literature, Germany, Horror, Literature, Classics, Novels

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Unica Zürn was a German author and painter. She is remembered for her works of anagram poetry, exhibitions of automatic drawing, and her photographic collaborations with Hans Bellmer.

Reviews

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

En una de sus famosas greguerías, Ramón Gómez de la Serna decía que “Aburrirse es besar a la muerte”. Este desgarrador relato viene a darle la razón.

“La vida monótona y protegida de la familia resulta aburrida, y todo está permitido con tal de mantener la emoción. La vida, sin la desgracia es insoportable”

Puede que si su madre no hubiera sido tan egoísta y distante, o su endiosado padre, ausente y decepcionante, o ambos menos liberales en sus relaciones, o su hermano no… pudiera ser que las cosas hubieran sido de otro modo. Puede que sí. Yo no lo creo, la niña protagonista de esta triste y perturbadora historia nació con esa semilla que hubiera germinado igualmente par hacer de su vida algo insoportablemente pequeño para la intensidad de sus deseos.

“… el sol luce estúpidamente en un cielo siempre azul”

Imaginativa, creativa, apasionada, el sexo apareció en su vida cuando apenas tenía cinco o seis años, y lo hace con un ardor brutal. Un sexo siempre ligado al dolor, que ella busca con placer. Sus juegos preferidos son peligrosos y brutales. La monótona vida diaria es tan insuficiente que tiene que refugiarse constantemente en fantasías llenas de riesgos y horrores que sufre y goza con gran intensidad.

“El miedo es muy importante para ella. Ella ama el miedo y el horror”

Obviamente, estas fantasías no bastan, la vida sigue siendo muy pequeña, el sexo es incapaz de aplacar su fuego, se siente vacía y triste, y el amor, único salvavidas posible, lo intuye insatisfactorio.

“… si él le diera un beso, se habría acabado el juego. Ella desea vivir siempre en la espera. Con el beso terminaría todo ¿Qué puede venir después? Al segundo beso, todo se hace costumbre”

“Primavera sombría” es una novela cortísima, de apenas 60 páginas, escrita a base de frases esqueléticas, como si la autora tuviera unas ganas apremiantes de soltarlo todo y poder descansar. Parece buscar más la potencia de una imagen que la poesía de las palabras.

“La posibilidad de amar siempre con la misma intensidad sólo la tiene el que ama sin esperanza”

Dicen que la novela tiene un fuerte carácter autobiográfico. Si es así, supongo que su escritura perseguía algún fin terapéutico, una catarsis con la que aliviar sus demonios, un escape a la tensión insoportable que tuvo que ser no poder salir de sí misma.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I’m familiar with her work as an artist and model, this is the first time I’ve read anything sustained by German writer Unica Zürn - who’s often represented as a surrealist, Plath-like figure. Her cult book Dark Spring’s been claimed as an autobiographical novel because it echoes aspects of her own early life and seems to prefigure her later death by suicide. But it also radically departs from the autobiographical at numerous points, while her delivery and chosen style make it highly reminiscent of Freud’s early case studies of troubled children and adolescents. And, I suppose, given how much time Zürn spent in and out of hospitals and psychiatric facilities in the years before her death, it may have been inspired by her own encounters with mainstream therapeutic processes. Certainly, there’s something of the cathartic about her narrative, and the overall actions/reactions of her central character.

It’s a very disciplined piece, unexpectedly hypnotic; written in a deceptively straightforward, at times almost matter-of-fact, style, the sense of detachment adding to its force. It’s told from the perspective of a young girl, born in Germany during WW1, from her earliest memories to age 12. Like Zürn's, the girl's father is mostly absent, swooping in from time to time, long enough to spark adoration but otherwise uninvolved. The girl’s mother is around but might as well not be, either closeted away or stern and distant. She and the girl’s older brother are menacing figures. The girl’s glimpses of adults' interactions, between mother and father and then between them and their lovers, stir a fascination with sex and sexuality, leading to experiments with masturbation and increasingly-masochistic sexual fantasies. Fantasy, dreams and night terrors punctuate the girl’s isolated homelife but the fears that haunt her also surface in reality, from leering men in the streets of Berlin to the violent sexual attentions of her brother, who seems to view her as an object he can experiment with. But although the girl’s desires are expressed through scenes in which she’s seemingly submissive, they are also scenarios she’s scripted, in which she retains overall control. There’s also an awareness of the possibility of discovery by her parents, so that the girl’s actions seem as much part of a mechanism of defiance as an acceptance of the role of victim. And there’s something self-consciously gothic, almost like a twisted, fairy tale, about this at times, that made me think of later writers like Angela Carter and Kathy Acker.

Zürn’s story’s been compared to the work of authors like Bataille particularly his Story of the Eye but although they share an element of delight in the perverse, Zürn’s approach is much less mannered than Bataille’s and less explicitly bound up with promoting a particular philosophical agenda. However, it functions surprisingly well as a critique of a particular moment in German history: the hint of Freud; the ornate, imperialist, militarist trappings of the bourgeois family apartment – which reminded me of Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy and her commentary on aspects of German culture that fuelled WW1. The features of a patriarchal society viewed through the girl’s outside existence, both at school, and on the streets of Berlin, also combine with other aspects to form a very recognisable portrait of post-WW1 Berlin: rampant misogyny; sexual violence; flashes of the grotesque; the sinister mix of order and chaos; spectacle over substance – as in the “longed-for” man with his mysterious, film-star looks and impoverished lifestyle. Although this didn’t entirely live up to its initial promise, it was far more sophisticated and interesting than I'd expected. I’d love to read a sustained study of this, one that wasn’t solely focused on what it exposes about Zürn’s personal anxieties, it seems just as much an oblique dissection of the anxieties and experiences of her generation.

Rating: 3/3.5

[[P] · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always been resistant to the idea of having children. There are numerous reasons for this but the main one is that I worry about what kind of man I am, what kind of father I would be. I am concerned about my capacity for love, or at least my ability to consistently display that love. I have found that, despite my best efforts, I often give people the impression of being disinterested; I am, I am told, as emotionally distant, or detached, as a Japanese novel. And so I can’t, I feel, risk putting a child in that situation. One of humanity’s greatest flaws is the selfish desire to bring children, necessarily without their consent, into environments that are harmful, to damage them with our own neuroses and hang-ups.

The little girl in Unica Zürn’s Dark Spring is, without question, one such child, which is to say that she is an unfortunate product of an environment that is less than ideal. Yet, perversely, the short, bleak novel begins on a positive note with a description of the ‘first man in her life,’ her father, and his passionate displays of affection towards his daughter. She loves him, we’re told, from ‘the first moment.’ However, it quickly becomes clear that he is often absent, initially as a soldier in the war, and then, it is suggested, as a consequence of a inherent male restlessness, or perhaps because of a failing marriage. In any case, the girl, who is said to be ten or twelve throughout the greater part of the novel, is ‘painfully aware’ that he is rarely at home.

This feeling of abandonment is made even more acute by having a mother who, although physically present, is emotionally absent. A self-absorbed woman, she spends most of her time in her room, and only occasionally allows the knocking child to enter. She even dismisses, out of jealousy, the one maid that the girl bonds with. Unsurprisingly, therefore, she suffers from a ‘dreadful sense of loneliness’ and is ‘tortured by a fear of the invisible.’ She lives, in essence, alone in a quiet house, and as such is forced to make her own amusements, her own discoveries, and, as a result, she becomes increasingly peculiar and increasingly a danger to herself.


[Unica Zürn, as photographed by Hans Bellmer]

In this way, the novel is a portrait of the negative effects of neglect. The girl is described as quiet, but this is not unusual, or especially damaging, of course. More of a concern is that she retreats into fantasy, into her own imagination in order to endure her ‘boring’ life. These fantasies and imaginary scenarios are not, however, the kind that one would expect, or welcome, in a child. She is, for example, terrified of the gorilla that she believes is roaming the house. She also plays games, with herself and with other children, that all seem to involve death, or, in Zürn’s own words, are ‘filled with horror and daggers.’ Alarmingly, this focus on death and unpleasantness also extends to her sexual fantasies, in which she conjures up groups of men, mostly dark-skinned or foreign-looking men, who ‘surround her bed each night’ and ravage, rape and murder her.

“They invent a howling theatrical language through which it becomes possible to express the grief of the whole world, a language understood by no one but the two of them.”

There are two instances of actual sexual assault in the novel, both perpetrated upon the little girl. This is not something I want to discuss in detail, partly because it upsets me, but also because I think the reader should not interpret the girl’s sexual deviancy [I don’t like using that word, but I know of no other that is more appropriate in this case] as being a consequence of it, or not entirely anyway. Yes, she is raped, and she comes to fantasise about rape, and she develops a masochistic impulse, so that she finds pleasure in ‘pain and suffering.’ But, for me, Zürn makes it clear that it is the pain of abandonment that primarily motivates her behaviour. For example, there is a scene in Dark Spring when the little girl allows, encourages, a dog to lick her between the legs, and it is said that her excitement is made greater by the possibility that someone – i.e. her parents – might walk in on her. They don’t though, of course; nor do they notice that her brother – whom she hates – is upstairs using the mother’s vibrator for his own sexual gratification.

There is much more that can be written about this little novel, which one can read in only a couple of hours, important themes and ideas that I have overlooked or only briefly touched upon, such as masochism, oedipal desires, escape, the importance of strong role models, father/daughter bonds, etc. but I have neither the heart nor the energy to tackle them all right now. Maybe later I will edit and add to this review. For the moment, I will conclude with something about Zürn’s style, because it is one of the book’s strong points. She wrote in clipped, mostly unemotive sentences, which add to the odd atmosphere. Moreover, as one might have guessed, the girl is never named; she is regarded with detachment, and described throughout as ‘she’ or ‘her’, and so on. So she has, one might say, also been abandoned by her creator, who will not properly, fully acknowledge her either.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brief, intensely concentrated dissection of the transfixing perfect pleasure-pain at the threshold of an unfulfillable desire. That the protagonist is ages 10 through 12, and perhaps autobiographical, makes each cut much sharper. Even at this age, sexual pleasure is a specific motivation here, but only divorced from any other participant -- the nameless protagonist is obsessed with her "wound" (and full negative connotations apply to her experiences), and obsessed with certain men, prototypes of absent father and dangerous other, but can only mediate between self and other via increasingly tumultuous internal fantasies. Any risk of actual fulfillment flips pleasure into horror and disgust, which lends the protagonists thoughts both a kind of innocence despite her desires, but also a tortured confinement without any possibility of release. As I said, it's intense. I should certainly hope this sort of pre-teen experience isn't too common, but if it is, it is vital for fearless work like this to exist and discuss it.



Unica Zurn, born in Germany in 1916, only began writing after WWII, soon moving with Hans Bellmer to Paris and becoming involved in surrealist circles there. Just after this book was written, and published, she killed herself by throwing herself from the window of the apartment she shared with Bellmer, which lends this certain sharp resonances. Her drawings are also of quite a lot of interest:

[Mariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now her room is almost dark. Only a distant street lamp glows faintly through the window. Now she no longer cares whether she dies on "foreign soil" or in her own garden. She steps onto the windowsill, holds herself fast to the cord of the shutter, and examines her shadowlike reflection in the mirror one last time. She finds herself lovely. A trace of regret mingles with her determination. "It's over," she says, quietly, and feels dead already, even before her feet leave the windowsill.

From almost birth to death before death the little girl of Dark Spring closes her eyes in slow motion. I almost wish that I could name the book from a wounding place inside from when I was a little girl myself. If you cut yourself to watch yourself bleed and then it felt good to cry. If you hoped everyone would forget your birthday so that you could see yourself as unloved. I remember a time when I was six and cut the leg off of my favorite Care Bear paper doll. It was a keenest pleasure to regret the act, to cry with my Care Bear who was my dearest friend. I helplessly wished that I hadn't done it and I savored it. I didn't understand it and I was outside of myself enough to not truly feel sorry for myself. This the girl of Dark Spring doesn't have. Her feet don't leave the ground of watching it swallow you. I began to uncomfortably see myself in that mess of pleasurable self pity from the age of four, probably before that. Running off to cry by haystacks, invisible to my small world. Wishing that I was pretty so someone would love me, glad that I wasn't so I could treasure that I could hate everyone who never would. Stamp your feet because everyone laughed at you over your attempt to be understood with a Charlie Brown comic strip (he felt happy and sad and everything else all at the same time). I didn't like this about myself. I cringed when an ex boyfriend had me read his outside himself pity childhood stories. It was a secret to be shared with me and I loved him less for the empty self pity, the world made too small. There's more to life than this. I wish that I had known about this book when I was younger, though. It might have helped when I was publicly humiliated by my mother about early childhood sexuality. I had been made to feel it was only me. That was too hard to get over lonely. I am unhappy that Dark Spring bears the description of madness, of alone in a world of everyone does it. We are trapped in our own bodies. I would call it a sexual fantasy that burns into nothingness. Men with hard faces shadow her in her dreams. They look beautiful as shrouds. She feels alive only when something could happen. Dark Spring lives the brightest when the girl fades around her. She doesn't disappear, she waits. It felt the most real to me when people are alone in everyone does it, the body trapped and not unique. Go see the mysterious stranger by the pool. It remains in the shadows as a dead cold thing when she won't open her eyes to see what the shapes are. Is it better to not be seen, to not see, for the unspoken fantasy to be possible? I don't believe this. The attractive figures of sexuality remain figures. She never wakes up. The eighteen year old housemaid who owns lingerie and the something that happens when she goes out at night. The man by the pool is imagined to hold soft images of expectant children inside himself. It is better this way, in Dark Spring. Go away, don't ruin it. Her brother rapes her. She feels that all of the secrets are already known to her, nothing to look forward to. If life was only about sex. Be a beautiful corpse. Say nothing at all. Maybe everyone who sees you will imagine that you are speaking an unspeakable beauty, the wisest, the secrets of everything. Or maybe they don't think about you at all. That is the most likely. Or you are a cow-eyed girl, an object. Eyes pass to the next. What were you living for a secret? Why was there nothing behind any other door, nothing else to ask? It isn't hope for a life at all. It is nursing the stomach twisting when there is an ugly. I don't want to be that angry little girl who thought furiously about how awful everyone would feel when I died. Or felt vindicated when I imagined that they wouldn't care. It is a hollow nothing. It should be a tragedy that she jumps to her death. It isn't because there was never anything beyond horny. If the most is the ache before, if you won't live any other way than hunger, it is only one feeling dead to all other possibilities. Keep it bleeding. She wouldn't have cried when she fell to the ground. What if no one cared? I only wished that she had cared. That was what was important. Who the fuck cares if people saw a beautiful little girl and thought what if she was something interesting? To their own liking, to be valued because you were what someone else wanted. No, no, no. This is what makes me angry and cry in frustration now. That I keep seeing THIS. The nothing, the mysterious silence, the secret. You are trapped in another body, a faceless one, when you do this and are dead before dead in this way. I can only talk about Dark Spring from that place and I don't want to. There has to be more than that.

[Ben Winch · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How can we linger over books to which their authors have manifestly not been driven?”

Georges Bataille

Manifestly, Unica Zurn was driven to Dark Spring, a miracle of compression, focus and intensity that charts a young girl’s thwarted sexual development with nightmare immediacy. From the opening –

The first man in her life is her father...

– she’s determined, to strip away, from the raw detail of her childhood, the truth – the myth – below it, employing a third-person present-tense perspective that collapses the years lived by its 50 year old author and drops her, clairvoyant style, in the centre of her subject as no mere “I” account could. This is stark, it’s now, it’s frightening. On the level of craft, it’s sure-footed as can be, every word purposeful, connected, alive. It’s short (80 small pages – 15,000 words at most – and a 30 page introduction more analytical than informative) but on the strength of it I’d say Zurn was a born writer. Nothing to prove. Her skills at the service of story.

Too many perfect works are anaemic. Too many hot-blooded works are broken. Here is a marriage of form and content so flawless it could only have come from a lifetime of practice. A dream-bullet to the head, a mindflash, a cry for help, Dark Spring is as real as fiction gets.

[Matthieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

...The sun returns and she awakens from her lethargy. The sun is now the most important element. Because of the sun, she will see him again. She sees the sun shine into her house. It comes through the high windows of the hall and down onto the floor, where it forms broad beams filled with dancing dust. She tries to step onto one of those sunbeams in order to climb up into the sky. Sometimes, at twelve years of age, she behaves rather childishly. She believes in miracles. Then she loses her balance on the transparent beam and tumbles onto her nose. Maybe she will succeed another time...

A nerve atlas. A bright place. A wound. Boiling words.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

The review I wrote just evaporated into some sort of cyber vortex and I don't feel like rewriting it. To sum up: while this novella covers crucial ground in Zürn's personal mythology map, speaking as it does to the early roots of certain themes and motifs she continued to explore in later work, it's not as strong of a text as The Man of Jasmine, though in retrospect I think reading Dark Spring first makes more sense.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dark and unsettling. I'm surprised this book isn't more popular, it has all of the makings for a cult book that depressed / solitary (the type who most likely read books) and young people would find enjoyment (identification?) with.

Maybe I'll write more about this novel later.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Possibly autobiographical? Zurn's problematic relationship with men is all over this. Very unsettling and fascinating novella.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

There's a book I plan on reading that presents the historical analysis that Freud, in his initial work with patients, observed the frequent occurence of sexual abuse within the patient's families and concluded that this was the underlying cause of the majority of disorders. It was only after his presentation of his findings was met with severe backlash from the academy that he revised his construction of logic and placed the onus on the victims, the majority of them young females, instead of the various other members of their family. Conspiracy, conspiracy, but this is the same scientific community that conjured race out of thin air for the sake of greed and stirred up the ablesit horseshitfest that is the vaccines cause autism brigade. Science has never been about truth. It's about putting forth a hypothesis and throwing it at as many walls as possible in order to see what sticks. Electricity and cures for malaria are all very well, but the motivations for every discovery are of a sociopolitical sort, and they always will be. It's not a matter of what the weak feel, but what it is about them that makes us do the things we do.

As I've said previously in regards to The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie and its kind, I've a very low tolerance for gore porn. If you want to engage with that, it needs to be on the level of Jelinek who not only shoves it in your face, but connects it to every facet of your processing of reality until you can't think of even the mundaneity of grocery shopping without feeling sick to your stomach. I appreciate Zürn's candidness when it comes to the pedagogy of little girls in middle to upper class European society, but in the apolitical yibber yabber that is the world of critical evaluation of lit, stars will be thrown at the strangeness and the sensationalism of the writer's end and leave the rest to rot. If there was someone out there who both knew the vernacular of the academic ideology this particular work was part of and wasn't afraid to get their hands dirty in the inevitability that is holistic appraisal, I'd love to read their thoughts on this. Otherwise, I don't need to read critiques of unusual German lit from the Cold War era to watch everyone avoid the multiple elephants in the room.

This is my final work of 2015. It's not the most auspicious note to end on, but sometimes I get more out of a book through what exteriorities I can use to respond to it, rather than the interiorities of the work itself. In addition, I've got another Zürn in my future, so at least I know what I'm getting into next time I pick up one of her works. Also, there's the matter of reading cred. Banal, perhaps, but there's nothing that shuts up certain sectors of loudmouths faster.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stark, both horribly pent-up and incisive, etched in copper with a child's raw nerves, inevitable tragedy mounting in each line with flashings of sunlight (inner coalescing ecstatically with outer) offering exit stairs, then snapping shut like armored eyelids and the stark world resumes, where steely elaborate fantasies (innocent, demon-infested) well inarticulately up from within to offer provisional outs through masochism and tortured chastity.

This novella provides the nearly impenetrable, though pellucid, outer circumference of a psyche with vortical & ramified drawings (terrifying, playful) nesting within:

[Mads]

Den bedste og grummeste slutning, jeg nogensinde har læst.

[Elena Carmona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turbio relato sobre el despertar sexual de una niña y posiblemente el retrato de la propia infancia de Unica Zürn. La niña de Zürn comienza al principio de Primavera sombría completamente embelesada por la figura masculina, empezando por el padre, y es después del abuso que sufre por parte de su hermano—cuando le profana su "herida"—que desciende a un pozo de desencanto y deseo, en el que la búsqueda del placer necesita de dolor físico. Las fantasías de la niña, plagadas de correas, espadas afiladas, regueros de sangre y lenguas de perro, la conducen a profesar absoluta devoción por un hombre—de nuevo santificado—de tez oscura. Cuando le arrebatan este amor, la niña Unica decide suicidarse de la misma forma en la que lo hará la adulta Zürn un año después de la publicación de esta obra.

El prólogo está magníficamente escrito por Lurdes Martínez, autora perteneciente al movimiento surrealista al igual que lo fue Unica Zürn. Además, la edición de [pepitas ed.] es muy cuqui y disfruté mucho leyéndola.

Solo puede imaginarse estas escenas a solas en la oscuridad de su habitación, ya que allí no hay nadie para salvarla. Todas las noches revive la sensación de morir como si fuera la primera vez.

[trestitia ⵊⵊⵊ deamorski · Rating 3 out of 5]

2016da gör, 2018de başka bir kitabını oku, sev, ama diğer kitapları ekleme, 2021de gör, ekle.
demişim, kastettiğim Yasemin Adam ama ben bile anlamadım ne demek istediğimi.

Tıpkı yazarın intiharı gibi, yere çakılan küçük bir kızın 12 yaşına kadar sevgi, ilgi ve şefkat yoksunluğu yüzünden -daha fazla çözümlemeye gerek yok- ve şüphesiz yaşadığı korkunç tecrübeler ile, bilinçsizce bunlardan kaçmanın yolları olarak sığındığı, yaşansa tecrübesinden daha korkunç olacak düşler. {Zürn, kitabı intiharından bir yıl önce tamamlıyor}

Çok konuşmak istemiyorum. Kurguda kaçındığım neredeyse tek konu bestiality dahi var. Saymadığım diğer konuların varlığı değil, anlatımı sarsıcı bence. Dümdüz, betimsiz, soğukkanlılıkla kısa kısa anlatılırken, siz daha olayın kasvetini atlatamadan ötekine geçiyoruz.

Bilinmeyeni söylemiyor değilim, ancak bir yazarın hayatı ve eseri çok ilişkili; Zürn'ün hayatı da bu küçük kız çocuğununki gibi, pek hissedemediği sevgiyi istismarcı heriflerde bulmaya çalışmış dersem abartmış olur muyum, sanmam. Feminizm gibi saçmalıklardan bağımsız, ilham adı altında sömürülmüş gibi geliyor bana hayat hikayesini okuduğum zaman ve bu konuda yalnız değilim.

“Ne yazık ki bu sık sık tekrarlanan zevk anlarını kasvetli bir boşluk takip ediyor. Onu gerçekten bütünleyecek bir şey arıyor ama bulamıyor. Her şey sahte.”

daddy issues, ja!
;;;
deamorski

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfscI...

[?0?0?0 · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Dark Spring"is striking in its frankness and refusal to shy away from the most basest of sexual desires and confrontations. However, besides Zurn's forceful and compact prose, and her gift of conjuring stark horrors with seemingly little, this novella never accomplishes much compared to her other work. As a portrait of mental illness it feels criminal to mention alongside her other works; as a coming-of-age narrative its scope is too myopic; and as a work of dark fiction from a person from-you-know-that-surrealist-group-of-peers its doesn't stand out. All observations I feel terrible communicating because I love her and her work, but this is an overrated novella with a few moments to recommend a reading if one happens to be into works of this nature, otherwise there's little here.

[Ana Llop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me ha encantado este libro, la verdad, mucho más de lo que creía y esperaba 😯

De fácil lectura, sencillo pero atrayente, interesante y con unas ideas profundas pero concisas que me han removido cosas y me han resonado.

Contenta de haberlo encontrado de casualidad ☺️

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasure and pain coming from the same source. Imagination and roleplay exactly as I remembered it. Before dark was dark. Before I understood that I should turn away from certain things, shamefacedly. The confusion of not having any boxes to put things, and just having to hold it all in your limited number of hands. Loved the spare-spare prose where another would have written tomes. Loved the distance and intimacy combo of the third person. Every word matters here, and is well placed.

[Meg Powers]

I appreciated the frankness with which girlhood sexuality is dealt with here (even when occasionally disturbing), and I could relate to the childhood preoccupation with an exotic and unattainable form of masculinity- the need to manifest masculinity projecting itself onto masculine figures in the form of obsessive crushes.

[Rafa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transmite los sentimientos como pocas autoras y autores. Su único defecto es que sabe a poco.

[Offuscatio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unica Zürn: niña-mujer. La sexualidad y el amor platónico. El deseo y la ausente figura paterna. Los demonios de una obsesión. "La posibilidad de amar siempre y con la misma intensidad sólo la tiene el que ama sin esperanza."

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quiet tale of a young girl's romantic obsession with an older boy she's never met, with an usettling ending. The narration is eerily distant in this classic from one of the few female writers of the surrealist camp.

[Laura Gallardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Desgarrador e increíblemente tocante.

[quim · Rating 5 out of 5]

«la vida és insuportable sense la desgràcia»

[Lucía Urquiaga · Rating 4 out of 5]

De estos textos a los que no le sobra ni le falta ni una sola palabra. Lo que más admiro en la escritura.

Va fuertecito eh

[Camèlia Rodríguez Balagué · Rating 5 out of 5]

Els llibres de nens són tant adults que fan angúnia i els adults que conec sembla increïble que hagin estat mai nens

[Milly Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es tremendo y es corto pero dura mucho, como lo que tarda en leer esa carta de cuatro palabras; es triste porque vaticina lo que viene; es exquisito y doloroso.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine a mutated child of Marquis de Sade whose uncontrollable urge eviscerates the host. The protagonist is inhabited by the genes of a misfit. Dark spring suggests an atypical masochistic sexual awakening. Spring is so often used a synonym for sexual awakening or rebirth. But what is born is something so intriguing, a mixture of the primal innocence of a predator devouring their prey in a visceral & erotic way. An anomaly which is so complex & hard to diagnose. Yet the story manages to retain a childish naivete which lingers & makes for fine humor.

Abundant are distorted views of sexuality, an infatuation with perversion, vulgarity fetishized, sadomasochism enveloped, a perfuse masturbation to the point of agitation. She becomes transfixed. The demonic seems to be innate. Pain stimulates. Deviant behavior buds as thorns on a visually pure bloom. Detail is limited. Detail is not absent in, what many may find as, grotesque sexual accounts, but in the psychology behind the tension & consternation of the character. She skims over these dysfunctions as if they were not large craters of disturbing behavior & yet I sympathize with her erratic thoughts. Still, she skims over the psychosis. Perhaps ideas are left up for the audience to decide. I find the fact that the main character is a child only adds to the offensiveness one might assert to the work. The character seems to paradoxically absorb the seclusion thrust upon her but the author does not. There is a convolution between her creations & reality. She cannot define herself outside of artistic endeavors. She is incomplete. & yet I think of the courage & honesty it must take to write a story which seems to bare so much. Though it is not necessarily an autobiographical piece, it is certainly based on living experiences, quite revealing experiences.

I sympathize with the mad. I find madness not so mad. I find the shocking does not shock so much. I find the deviant a worthy subject. I wander through the rational thought process that occurs when she contemplates suicide. To bring coherency to a seemingly unnatural thought almost exonerates what is seen as a blasphemous cause. The character, the author, this book begs the question, what is reality amongst the mad. Perception ultimately defines reality. How much of this perception is of a conscious assertion on the host’s behalf. I feel as though this is not a cathartic piece of writing because Zurn eventually commits suicide. It is a cold recounting. A sort of pre-documentation of the fatal ordeal. How I long to understand the roots of such psychological torment. The only way I can describe the mindset of both character & author is as an asexual parasite which reproduces at an alarming rate while feeding on the very festering of its own anatomy. It is a disturbing read but one I do not want to ignore or regret knowing. It is blatantly honest. It may shock many. It is not for the faint. It is as mental illness itself. It must first be confronted to be finally understood.

[Lectoralila · Rating 5 out of 5]

El aleteo del despertar del deseo sobrevuela cada una de las páginas que componen esta Obra. Con mayúsculas. La escritura de Zürn es apabullante, exquisita, atrevida, morbosa, única. Una novela corta que te mece y asfixia hasta que estás a las puertas de la muerte. No hay escapatoria. ¿Qué tiene de placentero el deseo con dolor? Todo. Un dolor físico, un dolor calmoso, un dolor íntimo, un dolor abrasador, un dolor que limita con el placer. El dolor escogido, no el impuesto. El dolor buscado, no el inoportuno. El dolor que avanza para convertirse en fluido emanando de la herida, escurriéndose por los dedos.

Unica escribe en apenas ochenta páginas un diario amoroso que va desde el cariño infantil e idealizado que siente por su padre, hasta el primer amor platónico que deposita en un socorrista, pasando por la agresión s.xual perpetrada por su hermano. Y experimenta, en esa edad tan temprana,
la incomprensión de lo acontecido, pero también la obsesión con las cosas del mundo que le atraen. El descubrimiento del placer y el deseo, las fantasías sin límites, o el dolor que la atraviesa y que se ve incapaz de apartar del propio placer. Su placer. En su «herida»

“Primavera sombría” es una Obra brillante, incluso magnífica, no apta para todo el mundo por su contenido explícito, sin límites ni censuras. Una obra para acercarse a Zürn, ya que parte de lo aquí narrado es su propio retrato infantil. “Primavera sombría” me ha dejado enamorada, obsesionada y magullada.