As soon as I started to hear about this book, I knew I had to read it: apocalyptic surrealist pseudo-sci-fi wherein a man seeks a women in a world gradually being engulfed by snow and ice. For whatever reason all-consuming ice has been very prominent in my personal symbology for well over a decade now (only recently noticed this trend, currently wondering how this happened). And it gets (justified) style/tone comparisons to Robbe-Grillet. And so it comes as very little surprise that I was totally caught up by this one.

This is an incredibly strange book. It only rarely plays out anything like the adventure-story-at-the-end-of-the-world that this synopsis might suggest in a normal story, instead opting for eerie poetic atmosphere, evocations of ruins and tundra, gliding shifts in perspective and setting, and perhaps a kind of very mysterious psychodrama. In one of the most Robbe-Grillet-like touches, the protagonist has begun to hallucinate violence towards the object of his search, and these scenes are continuously intercut with the action to tint everything with feverish nightmare colors. And I have inklings that this thread, along with the general feeling of unreality that permeates the "real" action, and a key transition in the middle -- I can't shake the sensation that these elements suggest some really strange things going on with the narrative of this book. To the point that I have to wonder whether David Lynch had this in mind when he started composing the heavily subjective storytelling of Lost Highway and subsequent work. Don't worry though: ambiguous as this may be, in no way does the storytelling trail off and abandon the reader as later Lynch can seem to. The final sequences, on the contrary, were rendingly beautiful.

I'm totally fascinated by Anna Kavan now, this visionary English junkie who adopted the guise of one of her own characters as pen name and wrote so intriguing a puzzle as this. Her female lead often seems a flat male-generated fantasy of victimization and vulnerability, but she fiercely rejects this role as often as she is oddly complicit in it. In fact, it seems like this could be interpreted in part as a study of the Male Gaze (still around of course, but certainly even more blatant in the contemporary sci-fi of the 60s). Not that female writers are immune to writing from the male gaze, but Kavan's approach to this book suggests that she knew exactly what she was doing here. And it's totally amazing and fascinating. Damn, there's just so much going on in this slim book that I want to keep mulling over.

But maybe I should just give Kavan's visions themselves center stage:

A mirage-like arctic splendor towered all around, a weird unearthly architecture of ice. Huge ice-battlements, rainbow turrets and pinnacles filled the sky, lit from within by frigid mineral fires. We were trapped by those encircling walls, a ring of ghostly executioners, advancing slowly, inexorably, to destroy us. I could not move, I could not think. The executioner's breath paralyzed, dulled the brain. I felt the fatal chill of the ice touch me, heard its thunder, saw it split by dazzling emerald fissures. Far overhead the iceberg-glittering heights boomed and shuddered, about to fall. Frost glimmered on her shoulders, her face was ice-white, the long eyelashes swept her cheek. I held her close, clasped her tightly against my chest, so that she would not see the mountainous masses of falling ice.

Note, may 2012: Incidentally, I've had a lot of theories on the narrative of this book that I didn't want to set down because they seemed to be mine alone and I didn't want to push people towards any one reading. But now, the part of Emilie's review under the spoiler tags seems to be pretty well in agreement with my reading, so go look at that, though only after you've formed your own ideas. This is totally the missing link between Ambrose Bierce and David Lynch, as far as subjective narrative goes.

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By the way, the excellent cover image for the 1985 Norton hardcover above is scanned from my own ex-library copy. The novel really seems to inspire some incredible images in general, actually: