Asylum Piece (Peter Owen Modern Classics)
Anna Kavan
Language: English
Pages: 212
ISBN: 0720611237
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
or care that I’m dying here amongst all these levers and wheels? Can’t somebody save me? I haven’t really done anything wrong – I feel terribly ill – I can hardly open my eyes –’ And it’s true that my head aches abominably and I feel on the point of collapse. Suddenly I notice that the light which hurts my eyes so much comes from the sun. Yes, the sun is actually shining outside, instead of snow there is dew sparkling all over the grass, crocuses have spread their neat, low fire of symmetrical
ghost of an emerald dagger spectrally flung. ‘Oh, stop – stop! Give me another minute – just a minute longer to see the green woodpecker!’ I implore, with my hands already, in automatic obedience, starting to perform their detested task. What does a machine care about green woodpeckers? The wheels revolve faster, the pistons slide smoothly in their cylinders, the noise of machinery fills the whole world. Long since cowed into slavish submission, I still draw from some inexorable source the
her. Every now and then, once or twice a year, when I was in a train, or waiting for an appointment, or getting dressed in the morning, the thought of her would come to me, together with a peculiar discomfort, a kind of spiritual unease which I would banish as soon as possible. One summer I was travelling in a foreign country, and, owing to an alteration in the railway timetable, I found myself obliged to change trains at a small lake-side town. As I had three hours to wait, I left the station
to run to the door. ‘I must go to him – I must stop him – he can’t leave me like this!’ she cries out to the empty room. The door is locked on the outside. She twists the handle and beats on the glass panel. The glass is unbreakable and an iron bar would do no more than splinter it. Nevertheless she continues to beat weakly upon it with her two hands while tears run down her distorted face. An attendant passing along the corridor glances with a startled look at the convulsed face with its wild,
satisfactorily: a telephone call will be put through to Paris, his railway fare will be advanced to him, he will be at home in the morning. Yes, it all seems so simple, and yet he can’t bring himself to get out of the boat. What is it that prevents him from stepping ashore? What is it that tells him that it is safer not to think, safer to remain vague, to realize nothing? Dimly, through a haze of unreality, he envisages the gendarmes, the questions, the significant looks. But all these things