Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Asylum Piece
    Unavailable
    Asylum Piece
    Unavailable
    Asylum Piece
    Ebook139 pages2 hours

    Asylum Piece

    By Anna Kavan

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    First published sixty years ago, Asylum Piece today ranks as one of the most extraordinary and terrifying evocations of human madness ever written. This collection of stories, mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical, chart the descent of the narrator from the onset of neurosis to final incarceration at a Swiss clinic. The sense of paranoia, of persecution by a foe or force that is never given a name evokes The Trial by Franz Kafka, the writer with whom Kavan is most often compared, though Kavan's deeply personal, restrained and almost foreignaccented style has no true model. The same characters who recur throughout — the protagonist's unhelpful 'advisor', the friend/lover who abandons her at the clinic, and an assortment of deluded companions — are sketched without a trace of the rage, selfpity or sentiment that have marked more recent prozac memoirs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPeter Owen Publishers
    Release dateJan 8, 2014
    ISBN9780720617962
    Unavailable
    Asylum Piece

    Read more from Anna Kavan

    Related to Asylum Piece

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Weyes Blood

      Apr 12, 2023

      Weyes Blood
      13 min read

    • Article

      For Snow Queens Who Have Considered Suicide Because Paul Newman in the First Twenty Minutes of Paris Blues Is Too Much

      Jun 14, 2022

      But I start with the great Sidney Poitier because his stardom was an established part of the Freedom movement in 1964, and he was to be the chaperone of my inner awakening that dramatic year. Indianapolis, my hometown, had some brave marches and two

      10 min read

    • Article

      Perfection

      Jun 9, 2020

      For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume. My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when

      9 min read

    • Article

      Oceans

      Mar 15, 2019

      I used to be interested in mountains. They moved at a speed I could deal with. They waited for me to catch up. It was like that all my life. Then we moved to California, and after eight years of earthquakes I began to doubt my ability to put things i

      12 min read

    • Article

      A Mournful Spring

      Mar 1, 2022

      in memory of Adam Zagajewski So many friends have you seen pass,maestro of the poetic eulogy. Now it’s my turn. Can you hear me?We don’t know. Why didn’t we spend more time together,talk more, call each other? I thought you’d live to be old,very ol

      1 min read

    • Article

      Free as Aira

      Sep 1, 2017

      Free as Aira
      5 min read

    • Article

      Lauren Oyler And Patricia Lockwood On Their ‘Evil Twin’ Internet Novels

      Feb 8, 2021

      I hate it here. Everyone agrees that “here” sucks. We are miserable and unproductive and lonely all at once. Time goes fast but not in the way that it flies when you’re having fun, more like when you wake up after a nap to find that it’s suddenly dar

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang

      Dec 11, 2019

      It was the last year of my third decade on this earth, and it seems with every passing year I grow increasingly alien to that earth, or it to me. The post A Year in Reading: C Pam Zhang appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Man Of Your Dreams

      Nov 6, 2019

      The Man Of Your Dreams
      6 min read

    • Article

      Sexting Scandal

      Jan 22, 2021

      Sexting Scandal
      1 min read

    • Article

      On Trans Joy

      May 1, 2023

      On Trans Joy
      15 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 252

      Mar 15, 2022

      The Art of Fiction No. 252
      31 min read

    Reviews for Asylum Piece

    4/5

    41 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I flew through this, despite the heavy subject of her descent into mental illness & short stories of an institution. I felt the pieces in which she spoke of her own paranoia captured the state of mind brilliantly, as she didn't apply retrospect (assuming she had any to apply) to explain away her state of mind but instead immersed herself, & the reader, in that neurosis. I was disappointed that the point of view switched during the tales of the clinic, but at the same time the different stories from different patients were well told & unnerving, & as some of the characters could have well been Anna herself it suggests maybe to discuss her time there in first person was too hard for her.
    • 5/5
      Asylum Piece and Other Stories (1940) is like a full body and mind mirror Anna Kavan intentionally cracked. Contorted realities reflected back at you from her stories come sneaking up on you, phantom-like, with enough distortion to make them unrecognizable yet eerily familiar. Mystifying, exquisite stuff, these sometimes opaque, always peculiar prisms to peer into, of both literal and figurative prison stories. In "The Birds," for instance, one of Kavan's unnamed narrator's (or is every story narrated by the same unnerved, come-undone-narrator?, hard to say exactly, but it's likely the many) notices two brightly colored birds outside her window. Her window where exactly? Karan leaves it ill-defined whereabouts unknown. Asylums can just as soon be houses, schools, museums, as they can be institutional asylums, in Asylum Pieces. Her "servant" (i.e., a person of unspecified title who keeps a constant eye on her, a "shadow"), however, does not see the birds.What conclusion was I to draw from this? It seemed incredible that anyone could fail to observe those twin spots of color, more striking than jewels on the gray January background. No, I could only presume that the birds were visible to me alone. That is the conclusion to which I have held ever since: for my ethereal visitors have not deserted me.We've all seen things, haven't we, from time to time; or at least thought we've seen things (and seen them whether we've ever been inside an asylum of one kind or another or not) that others have failed to see, right? Are we mad for seeing such things? Should we have been locked up indefinitely? Notice, also, the subtle implication in that last sentence italicized above: that even while the birds (i.e., the symbols now of the narrator's only means of expressing her hope for freedom; and that, too, even if they are just chirping hallucinations), have not deserted her, whom, we then wonder, perhaps already has? History is replete with misunderstood, or vilified, human beings, abandoned to asylums."The Birds" and another of the few fully formed stories, such as "The Birthmark" -- my favorite in this collection, in fact, and one, with its crux of incarceration and climax pivoting off the curious birthmark, the image of a "rose", makes me wonder if maybe Jean Genet derived any inspiration from it a few years later when he sat down to write his second novel, The Miracle of the Rose? -- and the many more multifaceted vignettes, make up the individual shards of Anna Kavan's complex shattering in Asylum Pieces.Some shards are sharper than others, like "At Night" or the devastating "Just Another Failure", but they're all keen enough to cut you to the bone, so be careful turning Asylum Pieces' pages, lest your eyes begin bleeding: An iron band has been clamped round my head, and just at this moment the jailer strikes the cold metal a ringing blow which sends needles of pain into my eye sockets. . .; or your imagination begins reeling, and you find yourself trapped in the her haunting "eternal fog" of some dark subterranean chamber filled with rats and roaches and little hope of escape, comrade of shut-in and shut-out characters voicing their confused consensus of victimized outrage from various obscure "asylums" they inhabit, these diagnosable "deranged" but somehow still sane Underground Women of Anna Kavan's; all of whom, I'm positive, would've made Dostoyevski proud.
    • 4/5
      Rich. Poetic. Real. Kavan is a master at capturing the insane aspect of all of us.
    • 5/5
      Asylum Piece and Other Stories (1940) is like a full body and mind mirror Anna Kavan intentionally cracked. Contorted realities reflected back at you from her stories come sneaking up on you, phantom-like, with enough distortion to make them unrecognizable yet eerily familiar. Mystifying, exquisite stuff, these sometimes opaque, always peculiar prisms to peer into, of both literal and figurative prison stories. In "The Birds," for instance, one of Kavan's unnamed narrator's (or is every story narrated by the same unnerved, come-undone-narrator?, hard to say exactly, but it's likely the many) notices two brightly colored birds outside her window. Her window where exactly? Karan leaves it ill-defined whereabouts unknown. Asylums can just as soon be houses, schools, museums, as they can be institutional asylums, in Asylum Pieces. Her "servant" (i.e., a person of unspecified title who keeps a constant eye on her, a "shadow"), however, does not see the birds.What conclusion was I to draw from this? It seemed incredible that anyone could fail to observe those twin spots of color, more striking than jewels on the gray January background. No, I could only presume that the birds were visible to me alone. That is the conclusion to which I have held ever since: for my ethereal visitors have not deserted me.We've all seen things, haven't we, from time to time; or at least thought we've seen things (and seen them whether we've ever been inside an asylum of one kind or another or not) that others have failed to see, right? Are we mad for seeing such things? Should we have been locked up indefinitely? Notice, also, the subtle implication in that last sentence italicized above: that even while the birds (i.e., the symbols now of the narrator's only means of expressing her hope for freedom; and that, too, even if they are just chirping hallucinations), have not deserted her, whom, we then wonder, perhaps already has? History is replete with misunderstood, or vilified, human beings, abandoned to asylums."The Birds" and another of the few fully formed stories, such as "The Birthmark" -- my favorite in this collection, in fact, and one, with its crux of incarceration and climax pivoting off the curious birthmark, the image of a "rose", makes me wonder if maybe Jean Genet derived any inspiration from it a few years later when he sat down to write his second novel, The Miracle of the Rose? -- and the many more multifaceted vignettes, make up the individual shards of Anna Kavan's complex shattering in Asylum Pieces.Some shards are sharper than others, like "At Night" or the devastating "Just Another Failure", but they're all keen enough to cut you to the bone, so be careful turning Asylum Pieces' pages, lest your eyes begin bleeding: An iron band has been clamped round my head, and just at this moment the jailer strikes the cold metal a ringing blow which sends needles of pain into my eye sockets. . .; or your imagination begins reeling, and you find yourself trapped in the her haunting "eternal fog" of some dark subterranean chamber filled with rats and roaches and little hope of escape, comrade of shut-in and shut-out characters voicing their confused consensus of victimized outrage from various obscure "asylums" they inhabit, these diagnosable "deranged" but somehow still sane Underground Women of Anna Kavan's; all of whom, I'm positive, would've made Dostoyevski proud.
    • 4/5
      4.5 stars

      Anna Kavan needs to be more widely read. She is very much a stylistic link between Woolf and Bowen, but perhaps the sheer unclassifiable nature of Kavan’s work—and I’m judging this solely on Asylum Piece and Ice as I’ve not read more just yet—is the cause for the other two writers being better known.

      Kavan mixes autobiography, surrealism, dream, fantasy, reality, and speculative fiction all at once. Coupled with all of these meandering genres and subgenres in her thematics is a prose style that is as inventive and unique in the modernist sense as Woolf's, as well as incisive in its social/political commentary as Bowen’s. Where Kavan differs is her highly subjective approach to the problems of identity, connection, and loss of autonomy: while these are all themes Woolf and Bowen explore in their own work, Kavan explores them textually at an unconscious level. While The Waves might be said to do just this (and it does), Kavan creates a world of no hope and no escape that more effectively mirrors a particular psychological state within modernist discourses. In other words, Kavan’s style is actually more in tune with the philosophical and self-analytical strains of modernism than even Woolf at her greatest.

      My main issue with this collection is that it wasn’t Ice, an attitude I couldn't help but have when beginning the stories. Ice is a book of pure genius, such a bleak and yet beautiful portrait of a world that is also not a world. Another issue is how the book is marketed as being interconnected stories rooted in autobiography—one could very well read these stories as unrelated, and I think that the issue with reading too much of the author’s life into his or her own work is something very rooted in modernist British fiction. The “I” in Kavan isn’t only her; it’s everyone. This is something that she shared with Woolf and Bowen, and I think that not only should more people be reading Kavan who are interested in this period, especially those interested in women authors of this period, but readers should value the stories in this collection for works of art and brilliant insights into humanity and hopelessness rather than as autobiographical texts. Doing the latter reduces the philosophical engagement which is so markedly evident in Kavan’s work.
    • 5/5
      The American edition of Asylum Piece, published in 1946 by Doubleday, combines two volumes of Anna Kavan’s remarkable stories first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape: Asylum Piece (1940), and I am Lazarus (1945). From 1929 to 1937, Kavan (1901-1968) had published six novels under the name Helen Ferguson (she was born Helen Emily Woods, married Donald Ferguson in 1920, and later took the name Anna Kavan from a character who appeared in her own fiction). The stories in Asylum Piece represent a radical and stunning departure from her earlier work and came in the wake of several traumatic life events: the death of an infant daughter, the dissolution of her second marriage and a suicide attempt. In 1938, suffering from severe depression, she was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland. Many of the stories collected in this volume are set in just such an institution and depict fragile, brittle states of mind. Others, such as those collected in Part One of the American edition, titled “The Summons,” present characters being persecuted, mistreated or imprisoned for no clear reason by a monolithic, impenetrable bureaucracy. The focal point in Part One is often “the advisor,” an official to whom the narrator reports for advice and guidance, but who proves to be either untrustworthy or uncooperative. In the enigmatic, Kafkaesque title piece, “The Summons,” the unnamed narrator is facing charges of some sort, but can’t find out what the charges are, who has made the accusation, or even what the punishment might be. Part Two, “Asylum Piece,” comprises eight stories, by turns moving and unsettling, written from a variety of perspectives, dramatizing interactions between inmates of a psychiatric clinic and those who treat and care for them. Particularly memorable is the fifth of these, which begins on a radiant summer morning with a young man and woman arriving at the clinic by car. The woman is nervous, exhausted from traveling and somewhat oblivious, and must be helped inside. The man is impatient and openly annoyed with her. At the interview with the head doctor, in response to questioning, she declares that she is there against her will and that she never wanted to come to the clinic, but even as she speaks she realizes that her hysterical tone is working against her and that her fate is sealed. Once in her assigned room, she descends into a state of despair. The stories in Part Three, “I am Lazarus,” describe a variety of scenarios and often depict the horrific effects of war on mental states. One exception is “Benjo,” in which the narrator recalls encountering a local character named Benjo when she was living in “the other country.” She had bought an old farmstead house and workers had completed extensive renovations when Benjo shows up at her door. He is friendly and the two build a rapport, but she is later disturbed by the degree of familiarity he assumes and begins to suspect him of harbouring some veiled motive. Many of Kavan’s stories are written from bitter experience and the level of detail throughout the volume is often astounding. The reader will also notice the prose, which is crystal-clear and tightly controlled, a trait that carried over into her later works. In Asylum Piece Anna Kavan unflinchingly probes the murkiest recesses of the human psyche. This is a dark, disturbing, brilliant masterpiece and a landmark volume of short fiction.