Asylum Piece

Kavan was always a dark writer, a very dark writer. Like Kafka, she writes of prisons with no bars, of paranoiac nightmares, of living in a halfway world between hell and reality. First published sixty years ago (Doubleday did it in the U.S. in 1946) , Asylum Piece charts the descent of the narrator from the onset of neurosis to final incarceration at a Swiss clinic. This collection of interlinked and largely autobiographical stories (Kavan suffered numerous breakdowns and was a life-long heroin addict) evokes the sense of paranoia and persecution found in The Trial, though her deeply personal, restrained, and almost foreign-accented 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, self-pity, or sentiment that have marked more recent accounts of mental instability.