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. ( )

Published in 1940, this was written when its author was in her late thirties and marks a complete change of direction in both her writing and her life. Until then she had produced a series of more conventional novels under her married name Helen Ferguson, but with Asylum Piece (now writing as Anna Kavan) took to the increasingly experimental style which would eventually culminate in Ice.
   This book’s first half consists of a series of short stories or sketches, interlinked and describing some undefined, distressing and clearly unstoppable process which is engulfing the narrator. There’s a feeling of helplessness running through them, of struggling in an invisible web, tortured by endless waiting for news which never comes. Then, on page 118, we come to this: ‘In a polished surface of metal I happen to notice my reflected face; it wears a pale, beaten lonely look, eyes looking out at nothing with an expression of fear, frightened and lonely in a nightmare world. Something, I don’t know what, makes me think of my childhood; I remember myself as a schoolchild sitting at a hard wooden desk, and then as a little girl with thick, fair, wind-tossed hair, feeding the swans in a park. And it seems both strange and sad to me that all those childish years were spent in preparation for this—that, forgotten by everybody, with a beaten face, I should serve machinery in a place far away from the sun.’
   Thereafter, during the book’s second half, the fog lifts both literally and metaphorically—suddenly we understand what had been happening to her and where she now is: in a psychiatric hospital in a country with lakes and mountains. That undefined but unstoppable process had been a slide downhill through deep depression and insomnia into Nothing, because that was what was waiting for her at the bottom of the slope: no feelings, no thoughts, like being dead while still alive. Now, looking out at the clear mountain air, she describes with fellow feeling and compassion some of the other patients stranded there too.
   Such was Helen Woods’ own life; it was from this same Swiss clinic that she was to re-emerge as, in effect, a different woman with a new persona, the new pen name Anna Kavan (taken from the main character of one of her earlier novels) and new style of writing. What an unusual, honest and understated book; and what an author. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

Rich. Poetic. Real. Kavan is a master at capturing the insane aspect of all of us. ( )