Word: kavan
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...American Vogue when Richard Berlin, boss of Hearst magazines, lured her away in 1932. (Today Harper's, like Town & Country, gets only the gentlest Hearstian supervision.) She and her fiction editors have bought and plugged such bylines as Virginia Woolf, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, Christopher Isherwood, Anna Kavan and Colette...
This description by a Chinese philosopher of the 3rd Century B.C. serves as a prelude to one of the 34 grim studies in contemporary psychosis (that make up Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece. Despite lushness of metaphor and over-ornamentation of style, it is skillful fiction by a 30-year-old Englishwoman who has spent several years working among the insane...
Fixed Obsessions. Some of Author Kavan's characters live in their own homes, some in Swiss and English clinics, some in the makeshift hospitals that cared for England's military psychotics in World War II. But all share a world where normal proportions and meanings have given place to certain fixed obsessions of supreme personal importance...
...insane, Author Kavan shows, the normal man is apt to appear either as a potential "traitor" and "betrayer" or as a blind, stolid creature who has no awareness of the terrifying "powers" that control the destinies of man. Sometimes these omnipotent powers assume human shape. They become "authorities," "officials," "advisers"-suave, tough men & women with hypodermic syringes who may rudely invade your own home at any moment, pack your suitcase, and drive you away to "prison" in a closed car-while the husband who once told you he loved you looks the other way, or assists the invaders...
...Author Kavan's mad characters asks, "to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one's innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there's no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame...