Asylum Piece

“In this nameless place nothing appears animate, nothing is close, nothing is real.”

This is the only Kavan book I’ve been able to source in the wild, and it sits proudly on my shelf: a first US edition from 1946 by Doubleday, comprising short stories and a novella, “Asylum Piece.”

The collection begins with “The Summons.” These short stories owe an obvious debt to Kafka, with their brooding hidden enemies, shadowy indefinable prosecutors, and the gentle erosion of sanity by unnamed internal and external projections.

Kavan is a vulnerable writer. Her words are an exhibition of a lived neurosis. She gives her anxiety a face in time and place, allowing these tales to teeter near the edge of horror. They are characterized by a deep, unsettling issue that can never be resolved, only lived alongside. Each protagonist, written in the first person as Kavan herself, engages with a world muddy, icy, and unsoothed. We follow Kavan in her maze of sadness: no entry point, no escape.

“I lived alone in a few pleasant rooms, feeling my life run out aimlessly with the tedious hours: the life of an old maid ran out of my fingertips. I arranged the flowers in their vases.”

Next comes “Asylum Piece.” Eight chapters, written as vignettes, take us into the lives of patients, caretakers, doctors, and the families of those in a sanatorium. These are heartbreaking windows into the lives of those sequestered from the outside world. Kavan writes tenderly and with great empathy about the dissociated steadily fading into shadows of inarticulable grief.

“What is it that tells him it is safer not to think, safer to remain vague, to realize nothing?”

The final stories are shaped by the stentorian echo of war. In these tales, veterans spiral into mental collapse long before trauma had acronyms. Free persons and asylum patients alike struggle endlessly against the world. Great heights of heartbreak are reached in “The Brother,” which should be read by anyone with a tumultuous sibling relationship.

Kavan stands with Kafka as a master of documenting the neuroses of modernity. With atmospheric gestures, like ethereal gossamers in quiet attics, she weaves tales of sadness that drift windily through every sentence, suspending us before the darker drama of life until only reflection and lingering suffering remain.

“In this world of false friends and dangerous ambiguities where nothing is what it seems, isn’t it best to accept whatever comes without resistance or inquiry, relying only upon the unassailable knowledge that in one’s heart a hyacinth is secretly and inviolably blooming?”