Anna 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.

關於這個作者

她齣生於cannes. France. 差不多1901年左右

在歐洲不同城市和加洲長大，

又在英格蘭完成她的學業。

和第一個丈夫結婚後搬去緬甸。

在緬甸期間開始她的寫作。

這是她的第一本也是最原始的一本小說。

她的語言優美，簡潔，卻因為觀點超越瞭當時的社會而不被認同。

她長期服用海洛因， 所以常常有精神問題，

這些事實也反映在她的故事中。

她死於，心髒病，1968年。