BOOK REVIEW: Asylum Piece by Anna Kavan

I’m on a mission to read more “forgotten” women authors of the 1920s through 50s. (Like Nancy Hale and Maude Hutchins.) I just finished a short story collection by Anna Kavan called Asylum Piece. 

Anna Kavan (a pen name) was a British writer whose works were “nouveau roman”, semi-autobiographical, and difficult to categorize. She suffered from a difficult family life, depression, and heroin addiction. After a number of hospitalizations and suicide attempts, she eventually died from a heroin overdose. It’s a tragic life for a woman of enormous talent.

Asylum Piece is a dark, surreal collection of stories written from a first person viewpoint, a voice tinged with paranoia, delusions, and a painful loneliness. The stories are captivating, beautiful, and terrifying. The viewpoint characters (who generally seem to be the same woman, progressing in her madness) all imbue their tales with a sense of impending doom that is all the more frightening for being vague. Some are set within the asylum, and the desperation of the woman (and in one case, a man) abandoned there is gut-wrenching. What makes the work so powerful is the realism of the surrealism. In the character’s head, the goings-on are very real. 

Originally published in 1940, the book was re-released in 1972 and in 2001, so used copies are not hard to find. (I found it in my public library.) It’s well worth reading!