Ice by Anna Kavan

May 30, 2012 Jeffrey Keeten rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: post-apocalyptic

As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.

Her hair was a blizzard, a shimmering cascade of pale luminous moonlight. She was fragile as if made of glass and crystal, built like a waif with pallid skin and bruised eyes. She is an ice sculpture carved out of a glacier that is shattered and reassembled time and time again. He needs her, desires her, craves her. He wants to clench the slender ...more

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May 30, 2012 s.penkevich rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Mi Hermana

Recommended to s.penkevich by: Kris/Proustitue/Nate D

Shelves: favorites, cold-and-dark, europe, ethereal

Note: This was just as good on the re-read

I was afraid the dream might turn out to be real. Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.

Stunningly surreal and chilling, Anna Kavans final novel, Ice, is a frightening plunge into the icy darkness of the human mind and heart. Written with a fitful urgency, the reader Note: This was just as good on the re-read

‘I was afraid the dream might turn out to be real…. Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.

Stunningly surreal and chilling, Anna Kavan’s final novel, Ice, is a frightening plunge into the icy darkness of the human mind and heart. Written with a fitful urgency, the reader flows on the glimmering prose across swirling imagery of desolate landscapes beset by an impending apocalypse, as the narrator continuously pursues a woman known only as ‘the girl’ while struggling to anchor himself to the elusive, ever-deteriorating reality. Through spiraling hallucinations and indefinite descriptions, reality becomes nothing but a translucent veil giving shape to the real violent and grim truths that exist only in abstraction. The blurring of reality and unreality that occurs gives these sinister abstractions a staging ground to take form within in order to explore the otherwise unspeakable darkness that leads people to make victims of one another.

Nothing in Ice is ever certain or concrete. Characters are not given names, and reality is only tasted in fleeting moments, ‘but only as on might recall and incident from a dream.’ Told through the disturbed mind of a narrator who, within the first 10 pages, openly admits to suffering from daytime hallucinations, the reader is forced to be led by the hand through this menacing novel by someone they cannot fully trust. Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and his use of the unreliable narrator immediately come to mind through this narrators vague descriptions and elusive explanations, much like the intentionally unspecified ‘thousand injuries’ in Poe. There is, for instance his explanation of the girl: ‘Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings…. It made no difference, in any case she could not escape.’ ¹ Despite being alluded that it was a cruel, obdurate mother that inflicted such psychological injury, there is nothing to ground this to reality and justify his claims. We have only his observations of the girl, much of which may be distorted and our own impression is further distorted as we observe her already believing it to be true and using our glimpses to justify our pre-disposed conclusion instead of constructing our own. The same goes for the slowly creeping apocalypse, a wall of ice ‘marching in relentless order across the world, crushing, obliterating, destroying everything in their path’, the consequence of constant world wars which lead to this new ice age. However, the science behind the ice is only vaguely surmised, more as if playing at a guess, and the reader is occasionally reminded that ‘no reliable source of information existed’. Kavan uses repetition to its glorious, full potential, constantly reminding us of the vague premises to reinforce their believability and tricking us to perceive something formless as concrete.

The elusive nature of the novel serves a secondary purpose beyond misdirection, as it allows the reader to experience the story and settings exactly as the narrator sees and comprehends them. The landscapes and the narrative are co-dependent metaphors of one another.

’There were many small islands, some of which floated up and became clouds, while formations of cloud or mist descended and anchored themselves in the sea. The white snowy landscape below, and above the canopy of misty white light, the effect of an oriental painting, nothing solid about it. The town appeared to consist of ruins, collapsing on one another in shapeless disorder, a town of sandcastles, wrecked by the tide’

The narrators own fractured mind controls our sense of time and reality, and often, and without warning, we are sent into some unreality, some brief fantasy and then dropped back into the plot as if nothing had occurred. ‘The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next,’ our narrator reflects, ‘I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping was confusing’. As the novel progresses the seamless hallucination sequences aren’t as obvious, and the novel suddenly drives forward at break-neck pace taking us through spy-dramas, courtroom scenes, war-stories and other edge-of-your-seat escape stories that we must ingest whole and wonder where the fantasy and reality may have blurred. Tiny hints of obvious unreality present themselves occasionally, such as producing a ‘foreign automatic weapon’ when one wasn’t present earlier, however, the all we can truly do is hold on tight and enjoy the thrill-ride. Time itself is subject to the narrators own distorted mind, as events are mentioned that he once observed that could not have occurred within the boundaries of time presented in the scenes, and the positioning of the opening scenes is a bit cumbersome to place along the timeline. The narrative almost feels cyclical at times. There are many different methods of addressing these incongruities depending on how the reader interprets the novel, yet it would appear that nothing in the book aims towards one certain conclusion or meaning. Instead, Kavan seems to write to give a wide interpretability because the real issues at play are very abstract and intangible, and it appears she would prefer to keep them that way in order to allot them their full force. Ultimately, depriving the reader of lucidness and conclusiveness brings the uncomfortable, uncertain tone of the novel to life. The surrealist qualities are elevated to near maddening proportions by taking any safe-guards away from the reader and forcing them to grasp desperately at the intangibles.

Brick by brick, Kavan builds only one certainty in this novel – the destructive powers of man. ‘An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.. Each scene and setting is beleaguered by references to wars past and present, ‘everywhere the ubiquitous ruins, decayed fortifications, evidences of a warlike bloodthirsty past’, and the encroaching ice and it is always at the forefront of the mind that the world is in a perpetual state of violence. This violence is said to be the cause of the icy apocalypse, a world collapsing both figuratively and literally due to mans ‘collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction’. Even the response to destruction is more destruction as wars rage on in increasing intensity to match coming end. ‘By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe,’ we are told, the narrator not missing out on the obvious ironies. He looks at the actions of those around him with disgust and dismay, saddened when encountering a violent brute of a man as being ‘the kind of man who was wanted now’ and placing himself in league with a civilized, admirable man that is brutally murdered for no reason saying he ‘was my sort of man, we were not like that rabble’ to distance himself from the bleak violence. Yet, he knows he cannot escape it and is constantly drawn towards the fighting, joining the army for a time believing he ‘was involved with the fate of the planet, I had to take an active part in whatever was going on’. The narrator’s method of misdirection leads one to wonder where his loyalty and morality really lies*.

The war-torn, doomed world is a mere backdrop for the evils that play out within arms reach of the narrator as he embarks on his crusade for the girl. ‘I was totally absorbed in that obsessional need, as for a lost, essential portion of my own being,’ he admits, ‘Everything else in the world seemed immaterial’. The real heart of this novel is the relationship with the girl, and the narrator freely declares the world around him as questionable, as a mere veil of reality where he must conduct his search. While the universal message of destruction and more powerful groups such as the warring armies victimizing one another is chilling, Kavan directs us to the more poignant and disturbing victimization one person can inflict upon another, especially one they love. The interplay between the male characters of the husband, the warden, the narrator and their experiences with the girl show an alarming portrait of obsessive, sadistic possession. The girl ceases to be considered an equal human and becomes nothing more than chattel.

‘It was clear that he regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing her only function might have been to link us together.’

These malignant pleasures of victimization are at the core of each scene, real or unreal, and illustrated through the vibrant imagery of each stark landscape which Kavan paints with her words. ‘All of this was happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.’ The surreal plotline becomes a place for her abstract ideas to flicker in and out of physical form but their malevolent nature is too poisonous to exist in glaring reality so reality must fold up and falter in order for them to truly rear their ugly heads. Hallucinations occur so we can look them in the face and make sense out of non-sense, horrific ideas are structured in a way to make them tangible enough to process. The narrator himself cannot even fathom his own depravity, and suffers from unrealities, or projects them onto others because he cannot face the blinding truth². Kavan presents a humanity that deserves the destruction that it receives, and this is the most horrific aspect of the novel. It makes one wonder if they are blind to their own moral deformities, conditioned to accept them as normal because we are so able to rationalize and gloss over the troubling aspects of ourselves. One must question if they are actually some damnable beast writhing in their own bile yet thinking it smells of roses and projecting onto society and those around them their own personal iniquity. What else is truly alarming is the way the victims become conditioned to accept these monstrosities, playing right into the degredation and violence. Kavan seems to admonish this behavior, creating a borderless world of victimization that damns both parties.

’In the delirium of the dance, it was impossible to distinguish between the violent and the victims. Anyway, distinction no longer mattered in a dance of death, where all dancers spun on the edge of nothingness.’

It isn’t so much an attack on the victim, as it is an attack on the whole of humanity, an attack on our own pathetic ways and weak wills that lead us towards being either the victim or the aggressor.

Anna Kavan was known for these startling perspectives on humanity. Her own life is a fascinating story. Born Helen Woods in what was assumed to be Cannes in 1901, she changed her name to Anna Kavan while institutionalized after a nervous breakdown following the end of her second marriage. The name Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone, brought with it a new personality and writing style. Beyond the mental illnesses, she was a lifelong heroin addict³. She died in 1968 of heart failure not long after this novel was published, but before dying she burnt all her diaries, correspondence and other links into her private life to ensure that she would become ‘one of the world’s best-kept secrets’. This fascinating woman had an incredible knack for prose and a sharp, disturbing insight into human nature. For readers interested in further insight into Kavan herself, they will be pleased to know that many of her books contain thinly-fictionalized biographical elements. Books like Asylum Piece cover her mental states and time spent in the asylum, Sleep Has His House hints at her sorrowful childhood, and her addiction to heroin and her open disgust of humanity is unapologetically broadcast in her short story collection Julia and the Bazooka.

This novel is one of the most unique and engrossing literary events I have encountered. To give it a genre would cheapen the novel, as it both is and isn’t science fiction and horror, being a work of literature as elusive as its own narrative. The prose will surround and penetrate your heart much like the wall of ice in the novel as it builds the gorgeously surreal images to dazzle your mind. The subject matter, and the tone, is bleak and chilling, and exposes a violently disturbing vision of humanity, yet it is a book that you want to hug tightly as you race through the streets yelling to everyone that they should read it. As menacing as a nightmare, yet as soothing as a pleasant daydream, this book scratches an itch that few other books beyond McCarthy’s The Road has been able to touch.
4.5/5

Gracias Hermana for this wonderful Christmas gift.

‘I was oppressed by the sense of universal strangeness, by the chill of approaching catastrophe, the menace of ruins suspended above; and also by the enormity of what had been done, the weight of collective guilt. A frightful crime had been committed, against nature, against the universe, against life. By rejecting life, man had destroyed the immemorial order, destroyed the world; now everything was about to crash down in ruins.’

¹ The girl, ‘forced since childhood into a victim’s patter of thought and behavior’, is here further victimized by her lack of name. Although ‘woman’ would be a more age-appropriate term for her, the usage of ‘girl’ is delivered with an extremely negative connotation that implies her as weak, a fragile and innocent ‘glass girl’ with no will of her own. Her physical appearance, pale and frail, is also used to highlight her weak and innocent nature, making the narrators own personal ‘indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer’ all the more sadistic despite his own assertion that ‘I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was. Various factors had combined to produce it, though they were not extenuating circumstances’. It would appear the narrator is trying to be upfront (this admission coming right at the beginning of the novel) to gloss over his sadism, but reflection on his word choices reveals the residue of the disturbing truths he is attempting to misdirect the reader from.

² (view spoiler)

³ Christopher Priest’s introduction discussed that many critics have unsuccessfully attempted to view the ice as a metaphor for Anna Kavan’s own heroin addiction. This overly self-conscious footnote serves more as an excuse for awkwardly placing the biographical information at the end of the review. The novel is best served by being examined on its own, as the details of the authors life are so engrossing that they easily lead towards the disservice of the Intentional Fallacy, as Priest discusses with the heroin-as-ice metaphor. That said, other novels of hers, particularly Asylum Piece or Sleep Has His House, have been interpreted as being highly-autobiographical. The ice, like much of the symbolism, seems to be reflective of many different ideas, but a corner stone to it's meaning may be (view spoiler)

*I was reminded of this book several times while reading Lolita. Perhaps it is that both books consist of a narrator seducing us into their rationality to make us oversee the abuse and power-trip they take over their helpless female victims, utilizing the victimization to keep them in a cage of their psychological torment. A major difference lies in that Humbert admits to the reader that he is 'a pentapod monster', whereas in Ice it isn't until the end that the narrator truly accepts his monstrous nature. That said, this book is also akin to Javier Marias' Tomorrow in the Battle, Think on Me where the narrator is deceiving both the reader and themselves (though Marias' narrator is not under the effects of drug usage). The control and power over a female victim is an ugly, disturbing thing, and Kavan presents it as so, letting the floor drop out from under the reader at just the right moment so we can all swing from the noose of guilt and depravity. This book is not subtle, and packs a hell of a punch.

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Dec 10, 2018 Justin Tate rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

If I lived forever, I would read this book 200 times, each time more slowly, bathing in every sentence and unearthing all the glorious subtext which must lie beneath its icebergs. As it is, with so many books and so little time, I still feel compelled to immediately dive back in.

Ice is the only easy read that's also a hard read. The writing is poetic, but simple and crisp. Never hard to understand. Actions are clear, the imagery ever-present. It reads, in many ways, like a movie--a dream-movie. ...more

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Dec 08, 2019 Amalia Gavea rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, american-literature, dystopia, literary-fiction, classics, 1960s

''Carrying my suitcase, I walked into the town. Silence obtruded itself. Nothing moved. The devastation was even greater than it had seemed from the boat. Not a building intact. Wreckage heaped in blank spaces where houses had been.''

A man is wandering in a land that closely resembles a distorted version of Norway, ravaged by a regime and social unrest. A small part of a world that has frozen and is slowly decaying. The fjords have frozen and the once beautiful nature that surrounds them is now ''Carrying my suitcase, I walked into the town. Silence obtruded itself. Nothing moved. The devastation was even greater than it had seemed from the boat. Not a building intact. Wreckage heaped in blank spaces where houses had been.''

A man is wandering in a land that closely resembles a distorted version of Norway, ravaged by a regime and social unrest. A small part of a world that has frozen and is slowly decaying. The fjords have frozen and the once beautiful nature that surrounds them is now silent. A world where monsters have awaken and every sense of dignity and respect has vanished. But the man of our story cares nothing for it. His sole purpose is to find a girl that has captured his thoughts. A girl with silver hair and eyes the colour of the clear sky, guarded by a cruel warden-husband. Through a devastated landscape and torn-down souls, the two characters must overcome violence and their own selves.

''She looked about for the fjord, failed to see it, lost her bearings and at once became really frightened, terrified of being overtaken by night in the dark forest. Fear was the climate she lived in.''

Kavan's story is a twisted, apocalyptic metaphor for the depths of human instincts. Nameless characters in an unnamed country, in a scenery of white, the colour of purity and innocence, covered in ice that has found its way to people's hearts. Kavan creates a world where there is no place for the innocent and the enigmatic girl has to survive assaults, physical and verbal, by the mob. Using the motif of the hero who stands alone against a society that has gone mad, Kavan highlights the isolation of the ''different'', the trap of the futility that lies within every attempt of rebellion. And it is interesting that the main character of her novel doesn't even want to rebel. He simply wants to live. And the girl endures but refuses to break, her soul full of anger, her spirit unbroken.

Kavan writes in a form that keeps you at a distance and rightfully so, in my opinion. This is the kind of story where the reader must become the observer, not the participant. We cannot experience feelings in a world where feeling is absent. Her images have come straight off a Hieronymus Bosch painting and the setting is the Hell of the Norse legends. She uses bits and pieces from the vast folklore and mythology of the region and mixes it with early traces of Science Fiction, while labels like ''Dystopia'' and ''Mystery'' also apply. The prose is beautiful and the dialogue is restricted where absolutely necessary. There are no ''fillers'' in this story. Everything is straight, raw, merciless. The weak fights to live, the seeker doesn't stop, the mob jumps at the chance to destroy. The only thing we have left is dreams. And even these turn into nightmarish hallucinations…

One could use the words ''Kafkaesque'', ''dreamlike'' and so on and so forth... I will use the word ''masterpiece'' without labels.

''For a second she stood still, appalled by the absolute silence and loneliness all around. A new ferocity pervaded the landscape now that night was approaching. She saw the massed armies of forest trees encamped on all sides, the mountain wall above bristling with trees like guns. Below the fjord was an impossible icy volcano erupting the baleful fire of the swallowed sun.
In the deepening dusk every horror could be expected. She was afraid to look, tried not to see the spectral shapes rising from the water.''

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.word... ...more

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May 30, 2012 Kris rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, science-fiction, five-stars, favorites

In this extraordinary novel, Anna Kavan captures the claustrophobic feeling of being caught in a nightmare. The nameless narrator relates a fragmented story of searching for a beautiful, very thin woman with silver hair, who is also under the control of a powerful man, sometimes called the warden. The setting is an unnamed country, in which informers hide in dark corners and people look anxiously over their shoulders for some unspecified threat. The narrator provides a fragmented depiction of an ...more

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Nov 27, 2017 Kevin Kelsey rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2018

Posted at Heradas

Its difficult to determine which parts of Ice are actually happening and which are hallucinated by our unnamed protagonist. Making it even more disorienting, the point-of-view dips away from first person occasionally, capturing events that happen (maybe?) when he isnt present, only to snap right back to our protagonists perspective as if nothing happened. Although, maybe he was actually there the whole time, hes not really sure himself. Sometimes, mid-book, his character takes ...more

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May 05, 2018 Robin rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: dark dreamers

Recommended to Robin by: Fede

Shelves: literary-fiction, horror, novella, 2018, english

I was going to start off by describing this as dream-like, but it's actually a nightmare.

The Earth is rapidly covering with ice, a death sentence for its inhabitants. Meanwhile, our unnamed male narrator in an unnamed country has an obsession with a woman from his past. He feels compelled to save her, not only from the ice, but also from her rather jerky husband, then later from the more sinister "warden".

What I assumed would be a relatively simple plot in relatively few pages, is actually I was going to start off by describing this as dream-like, but it's actually a nightmare.

The Earth is rapidly covering with ice, a death sentence for its inhabitants. Meanwhile, our unnamed male narrator in an unnamed country has an obsession with a woman from his past. He feels compelled to save her, not only from the ice, but also from her rather jerky husband, then later from the more sinister "warden".

What I assumed would be a relatively simple plot in relatively few pages, is actually disorienting. Just when you think you know what's going on, you don't. The narrator says something about himself, and then a few paragraphs later you realise you're reading about something surreal happening to the woman that the narrator couldn't possibly know. She might be encased in ice, she might be alone, trapped in a room. Then you jump to another scene, maybe another place or time, maybe a dream. The narrator admittedly has a loose grip on reality. This has the effect of keeping the reader off balance, on slippery ground.

We never understand why the narrator is so hell-bent on following the woman around. It's certainly not for her personality (she has none that I could discern). All we learn of her is that she is the eternal victim. She is child-like, passive, with a history of being bullied and abused. And she's very white and very thin with sparkling hair.

About 20 pages in, I was scratching my head. While the descriptions of ice were kaleidoscopic in their refracting beauty, I felt like I was playing a bad version of pin the tail on the donkey. Someone had blindfolded me, spun me around till I was good and dizzy, and sent me walking with the ass-tail in hand, towards the edge of a jagged cliff.

I started to think about Anna Kavan. A lifelong heroin addict, her tennis coach introduced her to the drug to improve her game (??) in her mid twenties. She lived until the age of 67. That's 40 years using heroin, which goes against everything I think I know about heroin use (obviously I don't know much!). Kavan, who lived through many tragedies, was in and out of mental institutions for the last 30+ years of her life - for depression, for addiction, and attempted suicide.

The book started to make a lot more sense to me once I began reading it through more of a biographical lens. The detachment, the alienation, the encroaching ice. The sense of confusion and paranoia, of the weak woman running from oppressive abusers. The padded, soundproof rooms.

And then it occurred to me, what if Kavan's pale lady is splintered and fragmented into pieces of herself. What if the narrator is actually the part of her trying to act as protector, and the warden is the part that punishes and controls. If this is the case, the poor lady spends all her time in a nightmare world, chasing herself, saving herself, hating herself, escaping herself, and occasionally, through the haze, trying to keep it together long enough to feel at peace.

While her life experience had a huge impact on this work, I'm not suggesting that Kavan simply wrote this about herself. There's so much going on here. It's a complex and experimental post-modern novel. It has been described as apocalyptic, Kafka-esque, science fiction, and feminist. It's all those things, as well as a bewildering, frosty look, deep into the unblinking eye of death.

And I haven't even mentioned the lemurs. What a book! ...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Fionnuala added it · review of another edition

Shelves: review-may-contain-comic-content

I was lost, it was already dusk, I had been driving for hours and was practically out of petrol. The idea of being stranded on these lonely hills in the dark appalled me, so I was glad to see a signpost, and coast down to a garage. When I opened a window to speak to the attendant, the air outside was so cold that I turned up my collar. While he was filling the tank he commented on the weather. Never known such cold in this month. Forecast says were in for a real bad freeze-up. Most of my life I was lost, it was already dusk, I had been driving for hours and was practically out of petrol. The idea of being stranded on these lonely hills in the dark appalled me, so I was glad to see a signpost, and coast down to a garage. When I opened a window to speak to the attendant, the air outside was so cold that I turned up my collar. While he was filling the tank he commented on the weather. ‘Never known such cold in this month. Forecast says we’re in for a real bad freeze-up.’ Most of my life was spent abroad, soldiering, or exploring remote areas: but though I had just come from the tropics and freezing meant little to me, I was struck by the ominous sound of his words. Anxious to get on, I asked the way to the village I was making for. “You’ll never find it in the dark, it’s right off the beaten track. And those hill roads are dangerous when they’re iced up.’ He seemed to imply that only a fool would drive on under present conditions, which rather annoyed me. So, cutting short his involved directions, I paid him and drove away, ignoring his last warning shout: ‘Look out for that ice!’

I was lost, it was already late December, I had been reading for hours and was practically out of time to finish this novel. The idea of not completing this book before the end of the year appalled me, so I was glad to see a glimmer of resolution, and coast down towards the conclusion. When I turned a page to hear a character actually speak, his words were so bitter that I shivered inside. While he was moving the story forward, he commented on the narrative. ‘Never known such numbing distortion described in a book before. Critics say it’s a chilling example of slip-stream.’ Most of my life was spent reading mainstream writing, the classics, some post modern stuff: but though I had just come from reading William Trevor and post-apocalyptic scenarios meant little to me, I was struck by the compelling sound of his words. Anxious to get on, I flicked to the end to see how many pages were left to go. ‘You’ll never make it with that attitude, it’s right off the beaten track. And those gender stereotypes are dangerous when they’re hyped up.’ He seemed to imply that only a fool would read on under present conditions, which rather annoyed me. So, cutting short his involved explanations, I turned the page and read on, ignoring his last warning shout: ‘Look out for that distorting lens device!’ ...more

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Jan 16, 2019 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Riveting, breathless, nightmarish prose, a stream of word-horror so intense it's hard to fathom, equally hard to look away from. The plot: a globetrotting rescue before ice-extinction sets in. Or is it a chase? Therein lies the rub: everything has a double-face, an ambiguity rooted in subjectivity and dreams, everything except the ice, which is ineluctable, a fact that no one can wish or dream away. A book like this is incredibly difficult to pull off, skirting on that razor's edge between ...more

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Feb 18, 2018 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, science, literature, british, 20th-century

Ice, Anna Kavan
Ice is a novel by Anna Kavan, published in 1967. Ice was Kavan's last work to be published before her death, the first to land her mainstream success, and remains her most well-known work. Ice is set during an apocalypse in which a massive, monolithic ice shelf, caused by nuclear war, is engulfing the earth. The male protagonist, and narrator of the story, spends the narrative feverishly pursuing a young, nameless woman, and contemplating the overwhelming but conflicting feelings ...more

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May 27, 2012 knig rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, 2012

This book is insane. That is what needs to go on the back cover blurb, not some measly reference to slipstream. Christopher Priest, in the foreword, calls it slipstream and likens it to, among others, Christopher Nolans Memento. Talk about being wide off the mark. Memento is fragmented, sure, but its a jigsaw puzzle with crenulated edges that can be assembled in a post-mortem. This stuff: its a different league altogether.

I need to talk about how I dream, if I am to convey the essence here. I This book is insane. That is what needs to go on the back cover blurb, not some measly reference to ‘slipstream’. Christopher Priest, in the foreword, calls it slipstream and likens it to, among others, Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Talk about being wide off the mark. Memento is fragmented, sure, but its a jigsaw puzzle with crenulated edges that can be assembled in a post-mortem. This stuff: its a different league altogether.

I need to talk about how I dream, if I am to convey the essence here. I wonder how other people dream, too, but with me: its insane (that word again). First off, time-space continuum is non existent. One moment I’m talking to a bunch of people at a restaurant, the next moment I’m skiing down a slope escaping an avalanche and ski into a tropical ocean where sharks are out to get me, actually get me and tear me apart, but then I ‘teleport’ into my high school classroom where I find out everyone graduated except for me, and finally, I end up being pursued and being, um, molested, by some syphilitic leper in a jail cell but when I look out the window I see myself below in an Italian piazza with my left leg severed above the knee. The worst part is that I can sense I’m dreaming, but can’t wake up. The horror of not being in control , of being propelled unknowingly from one disaster scene into another, the helplessness is terrifying. Dreams always, always distress me.

This is how this book reads. A nameless narrator chases a nameless anorexic victim-like girl halfway across the world. I can’t say how many times she dies in a particular scene, and resurrects in the next moment. One tableaux vivant plays out and the next one crashes on with no logical reference whatsoever. Its snowing, its a tropical blaze, she’s dead, she’s alive, the narrator is himself, then he’s actually the girl.

Absolutely mesmeric scenes reel off against a backdrop of some apocalyptic momentum: characters emerge with a qualia of present tense: no personal histories or attributes are divulged. There is an overarching sense of dread and despair which permeates the fibre of every nuance. The narrator pivets on his axis, buoyed by some bi-polar euphoria: he wants the girl, he doesn’t want her, he wants her again, informing his desire with implied Jekyll and Hyde morph: is he a saviour or a cruel tyrant? The girl herself shifts like an eel in a prism: she’s vulnerable and terrified, she’s an accomplished, heartless temptress the next moment.

All along there is a nebulous third character: the Warden. He seems to be a contender for the girl, but also a point of homoerotic focus for the narrator. Talk about the triple axis of evil.

This gruesome threesome make up the backbone of the tale. Everywhere the narrator goes, he stumbles upon the girl. Or the warden. There are many ways to skin this cat, but I’m imagining the Narrator superimposing: that is to say: he sees a stranger and projects onto her his object of desire: a Dulcinea at every port, so to speak. The Warden is most probably the woman’s husband in real life. Every time she vanishes, some real life person has escaped the psycho narrator, so he starts looking for another canvas (person) on which to project again. When he stays with her for a bit longer, he loses interest. Leaves. Or, she dies, and he leaves. Then starts the search again. This endless cycle of groundhog torturous repetition is the stuff of nightmares. The Narrator doesn’t really want the reality of being with the girl: he is transfixed and defined by the chase: perpetual motion so that no time is left to ruminate. About say, his connection with this woman.

She is brittle, waif thin, anorexic, psychologically tormented and albino fair to the point of being transparent, like the ice that surrounds her: in essence a see-through or non person. The narrator is probably transposing again. She may not even exist in such a form, in fact, she may not exist at all. She could be the compilation of all his hang-ups, the parts he hates about himself, a made up character whose visage he superimposes on every other woman he meets.

None of this makes cogent sense, but it has a definite wow feel factor. If one can bear to look at a Jackson Pollack painting and relish: this book will suit. If the squiggles are meaningless and defy aesthetic enjoyment: best stay clear of Kavan.
...more

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Oct 25, 2017 Edward rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: own, fiction, 4-star, uk-ireland

Foreword, by Jonathan Lethem

--Ice

Afterword, by Kate Zambreno

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Aug 18, 2010 Nate D rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: halucinating agents lost in tundra

Recommended to Nate D by: Patrick M

Shelves: read-in-2010, britain, favorites, ice-and-snow, 60s-re-de-construction, post-surrealism

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 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.

...

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:

...more

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Dec 02, 2013 Kinga rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: random, read-women-2014

I chose this book because I heard somewhere that it was about ice apocalypse. In snowless England I wanted to read something to make me grateful for a mild climate (which Im otherwise not that happy with). So yes, this book did make me appreciate a mild climate and also the fact I dont do drugs (generally).

I am yet to read a book which was published in the 60s and wasnt completely bonkers. Our generation seems so tame and conservative in comparison. I cant imagine contemporary big publishers I chose this book because I heard somewhere that it was about ice apocalypse. In snowless England I wanted to read something to make me grateful for a mild climate (which I’m otherwise not that happy with). So yes, this book did make me appreciate a mild climate and also the fact I don’t do drugs (generally).

I am yet to read a book which was published in the 60s and wasn’t completely bonkers. Our generation seems so tame and conservative in comparison. I can’t imagine contemporary big publishers taking a chance on something that makes so little obvious sense.

The great thing about Ice is that you can have fun with it. I mean you can interpret it in a million ways – not sure if it is your idea of fun but for me it is. On the surface it’s a story of an unnamed narrator searching for unnamed girl while fighting another unnamed man for her affection (why name your characters? That’s sooo 1950s.) And all of this while the planet is facing the apocalypse and ice is threatening to swallow everything. The reader follows this frustrating chase which makes less and less sense and it feels like one of those unnerving dreams.

One of the first interpretations that came to my mind was that of the Cold War. The brutal reality of that world, military governments, ice plus the fact the book was written in the 60s all seem to fit nicely with this theory. But why stop there? Anna Kavan was a heroin addict and you will have no trouble with seeing the whole book as an allegory of addiction.

Let’s remove the book from its author and its time. Then really – the sky is the limit. I think my favourite interpretation is that of a power struggle in a relationship. This whole ‘I can’t love you without possessing you’ conundrum. The whole you are the OBJECT (of my affection). Both men in the book are actually one man trying to disown the part of his personality he is not comfortable with.

All in all, it’s a typical 60s book. You finish the last page, close it and ask yourself: what the hell did I just read? And yet, you keep thinking about it. Every now and then something reminds you of this book. Some time later you are reorganizing your bookshelves, or maybe just looking for that book you were sure you had but instead you come across Ice. You open it at random and start reading it again.

“My window overlooked an empty landscape where nothing ever moved. No houses were visible, only the debris of the collapsed wall, a bleak stretch of snow, the fjord, the fir forest, the mountains. No colour, only monotonous shades of grey to the ultimate dead white of the snow. The water lifeless in its dead calm, the ranks of black trees marching everywhere in uniform gloom.”
...more

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May 16, 2012 Paquita Maria Sanchez rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, uk

Im writing this in Word because my computer and goodreads both die or engage in any other manner of stupid at random, which I embarrassingly admit is taking a pretty decent toll on my general state of mental well-being. Anyway, I will be saving every 10 to 45 seconds, so forgive me if I sound a bit. Robotic. MS Word does not like robotic as a sentence entire, Ill have you know. *save as why_world_why.doc*

I have not been reading much lately, mostly due to a perk of my new-ish job being a deluge I’m writing this in Word because my computer and goodreads both die or engage in any other manner of stupid at random, which I embarrassingly admit is taking a pretty decent toll on my general state of mental well-being. Anyway, I will be saving every 10 to 45 seconds, so forgive me if I sound a bit. Robotic. MS Word does not like “robotic” as a sentence entire, I’ll have you know. *save as – why_world_why.doc*

I have not been reading much lately, mostly due to a perk of my new-ish job being a deluge of free newspapers, both the city and the state rags, with their crosswords forever giving me eyes. It’s a decent excuse, anyway. I mean, who tosses out a free crossword? Well, no one that is me, for sure. However, I arrived home after work on Friday night to blissful silence, saw it as a sign, made myself some peppermint tea, and settled in bed to read the first book I’ve bought for myself in several months.

Party. Time.

(If goodreads instates a “full sentences only” review policy, then I encourage them to save their energy and just nuke my account. Because, really.)

So, the first chapter? Boo-ish. Though it sets the right situational and scenic tone, it lacks flow and feels a bit High School Creative Writing I. Almost like the book is being a condescending dick and following the newspaper policy of “write to a fifth grade reading level.” Seriously, push on. After a little bit of context-providing curtness, where we get our apples and our bananas and our strawberries and our miiiilk and our iiiiice (Oh! Seriously, accident), Kavan turns on the blender and keeps it all twirlywhirl for the remainder of the novel. Fever-sweat type shit ensues, mirages, nightmares, images lucidly cinematic, all bubbling in a cauldron, mixing and mushing and mutating in this manner too purdy and prismatic for me talk bout all in book reprrt for fave teacher class.

…and now you’re worried that it’s some unfollowable stream-of-consciousness slop, and that you’re required to engage in a million mental pull-ups to ascertain some, any sturdy mast to cling to for dear readerly “what the fuck is going on?” life. Or maybe that jungle pursuit entices you. Either way, no. Though the narrative shifts between two? nameless male antagonists, with additional layers of the nameless protagonist girl’s view—or perhaps it’s really the two? nameless male antagonists’ illusions of the nameless girl’s view?—occasionally sprinkled in mid-thought, the execution is such that you flow willingly along while having your bearings enough to carry on without feeling like you lost some part of yourself or your comprehension within the novel’s many visual and psychological mazes. Themes reassert themselves like thoughts go obsessively circular, sporadically picking at the bones of the story, slowly but certainly revealing a proper skeletal framework.

In that mess of an earlier sentence, you may have noticed that I mentioned the girl as the protagonist while also noting that her appearances as eyes and ears and thoughts are rare, and questionable at that. I only mean “protagonist” in the sense that she is presumably the victim in this horror, the one running in the forest trying to escape the wolves or the knife-wielding maniac or the Necronomicon demon-fog rapey-tree or whatever. Mostly, we get an oscillation between a cuckold-sort with violent fantasies of revenge, and a sadistic Caligula-type who has dominated and degraded her beyond repair, and to his greatest delight. Seriously, this is some dark, demons in the mind type of stuff. I’d venture to argue that what’s being presented here is the grieving process of a love lost, of the hanging questions as an emotional relationship collapses in its many never simple ways. Our primary narrator being a wounded man in pursuit of his missing lover, haunted by violent fantasies of control and consumption of all that is Her, shifts mid-thought from obsessive reverie and a tender urge to save and wash and hold this elusive mess of a woman, to dreams of teeth in flesh, arms pinned in submission to his power, emotional battery of the highest order, control, control, control. She takes the hits, and his love wanes. She wisely flees, finding joy in something or someone that is not him, and the thirst for conquest returns. You know how it goes with letting go, with wanting and then losing that want and then maybe finding it again for the wrong reasons: “you’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me.” Human feewings are gross and stunted, man. Just picture the killers from that X-Files episode “Home” and you’ll have a pretty good idea what our proverbial hearts look like. Or read this. Which you should.

Back to Friday night when I was reading in peace, all was well until 2am. I was about a third of the way into the novel, completely sucked into its vortex, when clonk clonk stomp slam raaaaaaar my roommate returned home from the bar with a pack of girrrrls in tow, all slurping beer and yapping while banging and strumming the various instruments in the living room, which just so happens to share a wall with my room, and only my room out of the three. Fuuuuck. Since they were cutesy hipster nerd girls with the adorable spectacles and the little tights and the vivacity and nothing particularly repellent to say, I decided against being the crazy hag-bitch roommate who throws open her door and scowls at everybody with crazy-eyes and wild hair, and totally fucks my roommate out of playing drunken doctor with one of them or whatever. Instead, headphones. The only thing I could find that wouldn’t distract me from the text was a playlist of the first three múm albums, which was perfect because it’s soft and atmospheric and I have no idea what the fuck they are mermaiding about half the time anyway. Turns out, it was a divine, culinary school worthy combination. If anyone ever dares to try and film this (though that is not necessary; reading this book is like watching a strikingly gorgeous, eerie art film if you have even an inch of imagination), I have some thoughts on the soundtrack. Ice! With an Icelandic soundtrack! Seriously, stick with me, future filmmaker. I will make you thousands, baby.

Or maybe this book is just a metaphor for heroin detox. ...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Mary rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 2013, dystopia

The atmosphere was changing round me; suddenly there was a chill, as if the warm air had passed over ice. I felt a sudden uncomprehended terror, like the sensation that comes in nightmares just before one begins to fall.

As if written in one long, fretful breath, Ice plunges the reader directly into the cold dark waters of confusion. To say nothing is as it seems would be putting it lightly. Perception changes from one paragraph to the next, keeping us teetering and anxious. We meet, or think we ...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviews, reviews-4-stars, read-2014, anna-kavan

Luminous in the Dark

Early on, the male narrator discloses to us, "Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me."

Its hard to tell just how much of a dream, no, a nightmare, this novel is or will become, whether it's a recurrent dream, or whether it is more than that.

The girl, his nameless, ageless obsession, the object of his pursuit, is brittle, fragile, shy, elusive, "her skin moonwhite, her face a moonstone, luminous in the dark...her hair was astonishing, silver-white, an ...more

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Nov 28, 2012 Mark rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Recommended to Mark by: Kris

Shelves: bleak-ass-ice-box

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

This is the opening line of William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer. It also sums up how I felt as I read Anna Kavan's Ice. I felt like I was watching an old analog television tuned to snow.

description

If you look at it long enough it's kinda mesmerizing, isn't it? You begin to see patterns, things coalescing and breaking up. Kind of like the shades in this novel. I can't rightly call them characters as they never felt that way
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

This is the opening line of William Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer. It also sums up how I felt as I read Anna Kavan's Ice. I felt like I was watching an old analog television tuned to snow.

description

If you look at it long enough it's kinda mesmerizing, isn't it? You begin to see patterns, things coalescing and breaking up. Kind of like the shades in this novel. I can't rightly call them characters as they never felt that way to me. They were empty vessels waiting for someone to bring life to them. Only in the final chapter did this happen. On its own, the final chapter would make a nice standalone short story. But everything that preceded it was a wash of -- nothing. My eyes scanned the pages, but there was nothing there. I felt nothing. Not cold, warm, horror, excitement. It was random scenes strung together by random events. Lots of "suddenly"s, like an old ghost story. Or Marsha Brady. "Something suddenly came up." But the something never led to anything, and in the end the something felt like -- nothing at all.

There were moments when, as I read, I could tell that I was supposed to feel horror. There were words like "blood" or "slap" or phrases like "stacked two feet high." But when these words are placed besides empty vessels, the vessel still remains -- empty.

I read this with my buddy Mary and about halfway through I asked how she was liking it. This is a short book and I knew that if by the halfway mark it wasn't clicking, it probably wasn't going to. Mary enlightened me. She told me how she saw the events arranged, and I gotta admit, if Mary wrote the story the way she described it to me, I think I would have enjoyed it. Not enough to be mind-blown, but at least 3-stars worth. On its own, the novel to me is worth a single star. It's that final chapter that raises it to two.

In the final chapter I finally saw a semblance of characterization. All of a sudden there was something worth paying attention to. The characters spoke, they spoke in a meaningful way. I found myself slowing down to take everything in. It was almost like enjoyment. Would the chapter itself stand toe to toe with the best short stories in the world? Heck no. Was it worth reading? Yeah, I think so. But by the same token, everything before it was worth skipping.

There were glimpses, in random words and scenes, that made it seem like Kavan was on to something. The book was published originally in 1967. Vietnam. The threat of the Cold War. Nuclear annihilation. For a sentence at a time, spread maybe fifteen to twenty pages apart, I had an inkling there was something going on. A comment on the state of the world at that time. In many ways, I feel that sixties and the present day are mirroring each other in a sadistic sort of way. That should have made this a very interesting read. But by the next sentence the scene was changed, some random happening was happening, an empty vessel moved from here to there. The new place was just as staticy and unclear as the previous one. And -- nothing.

description

...more

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Oct 12, 2011 Drew rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I had high hopes for this, but low expectations. I'd heard descriptions of it as hallucinogenic, fragmented, dislocating, with an apocalyptic-but-frustratingly-vague background. It sounds like a lot of potential--after all, many of the best books could arguably be described as hallucinogenic: a book and a hallucinogen both have in common the goal of transporting the subject to another reality. But in practice it rarely works out like this. When people say a book barely makes sense, but is still I had high hopes for this, but low expectations. I'd heard descriptions of it as hallucinogenic, fragmented, dislocating, with an apocalyptic-but-frustratingly-vague background. It sounds like a lot of potential--after all, many of the best books could arguably be described as hallucinogenic: a book and a hallucinogen both have in common the goal of transporting the subject to another reality. But in practice it rarely works out like this. When people say a book barely makes sense, but is still good, I tend to disbelieve them. This is because in my experience, when what I'm reading doesn't make that much sense, or when it's extremely hard to follow, I disengage. A line from the introduction: "Because of the way Kavan describes her nameless characters, and because she is so apparently intent on physical and emotional uncertainty, the reader is frequently left stranded, if only momentarily . . . dreams and memories (or are they flashbacks?) obtrude into the main story, without warning, without explanation or even without being given a rationale within the context of the other events." So you could forgive me for being apprehensive.

But that's not how Ice works. This book actually makes sense, and it's not hard to follow. Yes, there are dreams and/or flashbacks, but even if you can't quite tell what's going on at the beginning of them, you usually can by the end. Ice follows an unnamed agent (my term, not Kavan's) as he tries to track down and rescue (kidnap?) an elusive, mysterious girl. There's also a third point to the triangle, a man usually called the warden. His relationship to the narrator is complex and obscure, but not in the maddening way I expected. These three chase each other around a globe rife with strife and balanced on the edge of apocalypse-through-titular-ice. The ice plays into the agent's dreams and hallucinations, but it's very present during the "real" parts of the book. So, yes, that does raise the question, how much of what is narrated is really happening? And that's always an interesting question, but only to have in the back of your mind--not to try to answer. The answer isn't important; only the question is.

There are lots of appealing ways to read this book, and here's one of them: one could see this as the ultimate in deranged male fantasy, the fantasy of someone suffering from unrequited love. The agent clearly has some sort of official capacity, but he cares only for finding this girl who is, in his mind, completely passive and objectified. In his memories she is mostly silent; in his dreams, completely so. But when he encounters her in real life, the interaction is different--she shows him dislike, contempt, fear. So he's maybe not a rescuer, but a crazed stalker. Which would be consistent with a lot of the other things that he does.

There's more to it than that, too. One could go further and either interpret the ice-phenomenon as a delusion on his part, a faceless foe from which he can save the object (and I do mean object) of his affection. Or it could be real, and provide the motivation for why it's so necessary that he try and track down this girl; he loves her, regardless of how she feels toward him, so if the world's going to end, the best thing for him to do, from his point of view, would be to find her and spend the apocalypse with her. How does the warden play into this? Debatable, but his sometimes-friendly, sometimes-cold attitude toward the agent would make sense if it depended on how much of a (romantic) threat the warden deemed the agent to be. One could also decide that all the badass things that the agent does (for instance, disguising himself in a military uniform, running over a motorcycle-mounted officer who's shooting at him, and ramming a frontier barricade) are exaggerations caused by his incredible narcissism, and contributing to his high-stakes, end-of-the-world romantic delusions.

So with this interpretation we have the agent as Humbert Humbert: a man who is objectively a monster, but through his narration he obscures that truth. Humbert Humbert does it with his eloquence, the agent with his insanity. To the extent that we believe his story, we believe he is good. And obversely.

But Ice is way deeper than that, because its slipstream nature allows multiple interpretations to be true in their potential. Lots of novels try to do this sort of thing and fail miserably; like I've said before, usually the idea of having many different interpretations signals some sort of cop-out. This book, on the other hand, is like its own personal multiverse. It just works. I have no idea how Kavan pulled it off.

A note about the prose: it doesn't exactly seem like anything too impressive at first, but it's a slow burn. Here's a quote that I think is representative: "They moved with weak and tottering steps in a slow, shambling procession, their movements unco-ordinated, their faded faces reddened by the blast." The description progresses from specific to a little more cryptic, e.g. what does she mean by faded, exactly? Is it physical or emotional? And so on. Notice the iambic pentameter in the last clause, too, making it more (literally) poetic than the workmanlike rhythm of the rest of the sentence. I'm no scholar, but I'm guessing that this prose is designed to work on a subconscious level--something more subtle than your standard look-at-the-clever-metaphor Franzen-type fare. And that's the effect I think it has.

In short, liking Ice this much was quite a surprise. I'd recommend it to almost anybody, even someone who doesn't think it's his cup of tea. Because I was that guy too. ...more

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Jan 03, 2015 Lisa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015-women

What struck me most was the violence. Not the cataclysmic violence of an encroaching nuclear winter, or the senseless murder and destruction of wartime. It was the hand on an arm, the psychological hold of one person on another, the deer-in-headlights look of a woman whose ordained profession is that of "victim". Science fiction? Post-apocalyptic thriller? That was all atmosphere. Ultimately, I read Ice as a book about the push-and-pull of unhealthy, tortured relationships. It uncovers the ...more

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May 18, 2012 Mariel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Mother Russia

Recommended to Mariel by: Nate

"The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring."

I think I'm going to be one of those famous last words people. Opening lines... (Check what was this?) "I was lost."

Anna Kavan's Ice spoke to my self destructive side. The fated victim and her determined destructors. There can be no joy, only a soul dark itch scratching from the feel of the blade on the skin. 'Ice' is like staring at unbroken skin and imagining the bleeding. The coldness is a burn of on the verge. Pursuit and no thrills. The ...more

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Feb 23, 2017 Althea Ann rated it liked it · review of another edition

This month's post-apocalyptic book club selection!

I actually read the 1974 paperback, but that cover is so bad that I just don't want to stare at it in my book list all year! (https://images.gr-assets.com/books/13...) That edition also features an introduction by Brian Aldiss, who is responsible for convincing Kavan to allow him to market her book as a science fiction title. It's kind of... not, however.

Also, I really wished that the introduction had been positioned as an afterword. It contains This month's post-apocalyptic book club selection!

I actually read the 1974 paperback, but that cover is so bad that I just don't want to stare at it in my book list all year! (https://images.gr-assets.com/books/13...) That edition also features an introduction by Brian Aldiss, who is responsible for convincing Kavan to allow him to market her book as a science fiction title. It's kind of... not, however.

Also, I really wished that the introduction had been positioned as an afterword. It contains biographical information and interpretations of the work that I felt really colored my experience of the piece; and I would have much preferred to read them later.

The book is a strange one. It's extremely Symbolist, where everything feels like it's an indirect metaphor for something else. The title is apt - the writing comes at a scenario from different angles, showing us a scene as if viewed through an ice crystal, where everything looks different depending on what facet you're viewing it through.

On one level, the book is a feminist cry, showing a woman who is pursued and oppressed, never simply let alone, by the relentless men around her. On another level (I thought, the most significant one), I read the entire thing as a metaphor for one person's internal landscape, and the feeling of being caught by relentless depression. It could also be interpreted as being about the experience of being incarcerated in a mental hospital.

The narrator of the book is a man in a war-torn, increasingly apocalyptic country. But the main character is the unnamed 'girl,' a frail, pale figure. Identity is uncertain. Is there one girl, or many different, similar women? There are three men in the book - the girl's husband, the narrator (who describes himself as the husband's rival) and the Warden. The narrator is also described as schizophrenic, and all three men may really be the same. The girl seems weak and pathetic, but it is uncertain if this is fact, or if it is how she is viewed. Love is also obsession, is also war, as military force is juxtaposed with romantic impulses. The threat of violence, of crushing suffocation, is omnipresent. Always, the ice is closing in.

I cannot say that I loved this book, but it is certainly a fascinating, complex and worthwhile read. ...more

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Sep 05, 2016 Jonfaith rated it it was ok · review of another edition

She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.

Likely 2.5 stars. Ice is a mess of symbols running amok amongst myriad time signatures, the headlines being transposed into morality fables and a strange girl with silver hair insisting for 209 pages that No Means No. Kavan deftly assembles a nightmarish sound stage. It certainly exhibits the slipping mechanics and logic of our slumbers. It simply grew flat. The Ice Age is ...more

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Sep 30, 2013 Aubrey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 4-star, reviewed, disturbation, reality-check, 1-read-on-hand, shorty-short, 500-wm-added, r-goodreads, r-2015, antidote-think-twice-read

I partook in figure skating from as early as I can remember up until graduating from high school for the purposes of getting into a good college. For all that I have no interest in ever taking it up again, the sport of art was made up of characteristics that suited: solitude, lack of sun, conditions that both pushed to movement and desensitized to pain. Attested to by a multitude of scrapes, bruises, the odd broken bone and sliced up wrists of careless others, my aesthetic of action grew on a I partook in figure skating from as early as I can remember up until graduating from high school for the purposes of getting into a good college. For all that I have no interest in ever taking it up again, the sport of art was made up of characteristics that suited: solitude, lack of sun, conditions that both pushed to movement and desensitized to pain. Attested to by a multitude of scrapes, bruises, the odd broken bone and sliced up wrists of careless others, my aesthetic of action grew on a framework to which this work appeals. I'd wish for this to be made a movie if I thought contemporary times could do it justice, but alas. Besides, there's far too much adulation of fascism ingrained in the systems of the everyday mundane as is.

My time is not of nuclear winter, but global warming; combine with a bloated burning of a summer on my side of the globe and you have a subliminal lust for the other end of the dichotomy that is not apparent until it's scratched. Not enough to be content with deconstructions any less potent than those of The Left Hand of Darkness but, for worse, those slow and careful methodologies fitted for survival have far too little rapine to appeal to inherent minds of today bred on mythologies of ago. In Kavan's time, technology did not dominate in both the overt and the subtle as it does today, every lie requiring power and every truth bleeding through, so her postapocalyptica leads on the aged wires and strings of blissful ignorance and patriarchal ideology. The latter has adapted itself well enough, but an ice-bound drive to the death would be harder, what with all those other voices clamoring behind.

At the heart of the appeal is how the old is fashioned anew without breaking out of the accustomed mold of guns, steel, frenzied accomplishment, fitted abuse, linear narrative, first person of alternate emote and action, self-reflexive unreliability that pursues itself to the wasteland, and the usual assumptions of gender, economy, warlords and world powers. Times have changed, though, and with 'Mad Max: Fury Road' already in cinematographic experience, I doubt this will ever get its movie. For the better, perhaps. Regardless, I can still enjoy its music. ...more

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Dec 01, 2016 Alex rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: fans of lemurs and death

Shelves: 2016

"Kafka's sister" is how Anna Kavan gets described sometimes, and she shares Kafka's frustration, the feeling that the world makes no sense. One is not sure how to find what one is looking for; one is not even sure what one is looking for. One is not sure what one is doing, but it does not seem to be going well.

All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.

But "Kafka's sister" feels a little patronizing, doesn't ...more

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Nov 26, 2012 Maciek rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dystopia, reviewed, post-apocalyptic, read-in-2014

Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods, and later changed her name after a character from her own novel. Ice is arguably her most famous book, and the last that was published during her lifetime, in 1967 - she died only a year later.

Ice is a novel which defies categorization - it has been classified as science fiction and even won a genre award, but it's science fiction in the same sense that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is fantasy. In the introduction, Christopher Priest classifies it as "slipstream" Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods, and later changed her name after a character from her own novel. Ice is arguably her most famous book, and the last that was published during her lifetime, in 1967 - she died only a year later.

Ice is a novel which defies categorization - it has been classified as science fiction and even won a genre award, but it's science fiction in the same sense that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is fantasy. In the introduction, Christopher Priest classifies it as "slipstream" - which seems to be nothing more than a convenient way to label very strage books which swim between more conventional genre boundaries, often disregarding them all together.

Ice is notoriously difficult to describe. It is set in a world which is like our own, but at the same time surreal and incomprehensible. The countries and towns which this world contains are not named, and there is never any sign available which would guide us along the way and show us where we are. The world of Ice is frozen and cold, constantly threatened by an approaching catastrophe: there's a notion of a great conflict about to erupt, and giant blocks of ice loom just out of reach, threatening to crush everything in front of them. Whether it is a bit heavy metaphor for the Cold War or the author's own depression and addiction to heavy drugs is for the reader to decide.

The book does not have a conventional plot; the story, as it is, is fractured and disjointed. It's characters traverse the frozen, unknown world in search of each other: the unnamed narrator pursues an unnamed, almost mythical woman, who is held by a man known only as "The Warden".
The narrator reveals very little about his past and himself, and the other two characters rarely get to speak for themselves; even when they do, we see them through his eyes, which are not reliable. As he travels through a ravaged, war-torn landscape towards the girl he seeks, the narrator slips into hallucinations and dreams within dreams, which become indistinguishable from reality; he goes through the same motion over and over - he meets both the girl and the warden and is met with a mixture of coldness and hostility, and walks away only to encounter both elsewhere.

As the planet slowly slips into the next ice age, we begin to ask ourselves questions regarding the narrator and his story: does the girl he pursue even exist, or is she a projection of his desire? Does The Warden exist, or is he a projection of the narrator himself? Is the looming catastrophe real, or is it the narrator's personal madness, possibly mirroring the author's and fueled by drugs and depression? Perhaps the answer is more spiritual, and the narrator is a doomed soul and a cruel variation on Dante, forced to wander through different rooms of hell throughout eternity.

Don't let the short length of the book fool you - there's enough material here for at least several classroom discussions. Don't be discouraged by the book's disjointed structure - Kavan writes clearly and engagingly, and manages to grab the reader with the first sentence and not let go until the last page. This is a novel to be read several times - ideal for readers willing to engage it critically, seek and exchange their own interpretations. ...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Stephen P rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

The first few pages of Kavan's novel were poorly written bordering on amateurish. If in a bookshop I was peeking in to see if I wanted to buy it I would have put it back and moved on. However, the respect I have for my GR friends and their excitement over Ice pushed me forward.

The story of a man searching for a woman, befuddled as to the reasons why within ten more pages unfolds into the intensity of Kavan's imagery. The imagery opens itself up to a number of interpretations, the brutality of The first few pages of Kavan's novel were poorly written bordering on amateurish. If in a bookshop I was peeking in to see if I wanted to buy it I would have put it back and moved on. However, the respect I have for my GR friends and their excitement over Ice pushed me forward.

The story of a man searching for a woman, befuddled as to the reasons why within ten more pages unfolds into the intensity of Kavan's imagery. The imagery opens itself up to a number of interpretations, the brutality of human nature, the striving for power and control, beyond convention the isolation of human beings,the destruction of the environment and its bleak consequences, and possibly many others constituting this therefore as one of the successful pieces of literature that provides a universality through time and cultures. There is also among these very authentic readings the possibility of reading Ice as an internal impending doom to a vulnerable and defenseless person awaiting certain emotional devastation. I feel certain that even if I had not known a little of Kavan's history I would still have been led to this reading.

Though the narrator of Ice is a male this is Kavan's story. Each person, object, atmospheric change is a projection of the brutality of her relationship with herself and yearning for something she understands is beyond the time allotted for any hopeful search. I realized early on that what I took for amateurish writing in the first few pages was Kavan's resistance to proceed. She was about to enter territory she had no assurance could be contained. The chance of the material exploding beyond her emotional limits were real. This was stepping into an unknown, a void, that few would have the courage to explore. I certainly wouldn't. She reached a point, a line, that does not appear to be gradual, where she leaped. This was an act of sheer courage that will not be memorialized by any medal, trophy, or statue. It will be memorialized by the unbearable, relentless intensity which bores through the readers soul.

Yes, the imagery is astonishing, as powerful as anything I have read. It is not rounded, polished or poetic. It is savage. It is not an imagery that creates a symbol alluding to something. It is the brutality of an image which puts the reader through the blood-soaked, sweated foreboding that Kavan is and does go through. There is no time to refer to literary theory, interpretations, or similarities to other authors. You have no choice. You cannot even stop to reach for a glass of water. You are there. You are living it. You know and will always know what it is like.

This is not a book I would recommend to someone. It would be akin to tossing them a grenade and letting them find out where the pin is and how to pull it out. However for those those who would be interested I believe they will find within the explosion of this poor courageous woman's book, the initial urge for stories to be created and told, the urge for others to understand what our experience is like. ...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Szplug rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Evoking a spectral spell, channeling a disorienting dream: stark and ethereal, a visionary's vision of life drained of all but obsession and fear; and yet, notwithstanding all of the preceding, curiously unaffecting when the gelid intravenous rush has passed. Although Kavan comes with references toand I can definitely detect traces ofFranz Kafka, Ice reminded me rather throughout of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled , though featuring a much darker and more malignant chaotic slippage. Its subzero Evoking a spectral spell, channeling a disorienting dream: stark and ethereal, a visionary's vision of life drained of all but obsession and fear; and yet, notwithstanding all of the preceding, curiously unaffecting when the gelid intravenous rush has passed. Although Kavan comes with references to—and I can definitely detect traces of—Franz Kafka, Ice reminded me rather throughout of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled , though featuring a much darker and more malignant chaotic slippage. Its subzero storying springs a naïf drained of all colour and left a blank canvas for the male to pin his frenzied, distorting, and cruelly unshaping desires—and rebound-effect softening and hushed pauses—onto; and note the use of dude in the singular, because, in my estimation, the narrator was the husband, was the warden, in a manner of speaking, doppler ghosts trailing a locomotive voyage through the hallucination of space-time. As for the strangely unevasive elusive ivory litheness that is the girl—while the ageless lass takes unto herself the violent concussive emotions discharged by her masculine pursuer, she also possesses a magnetically withdrawn and alluringly negatory persona steeled with feminine nature's unyielding and perduring ability to surmount all challenges and slay or sway with tears, sneers, and taut contortions. She reminded me throughout of the moon, which, in Kavan's fictive understanding, watches the world with its dead eye. The girl is the barycentric orbit of our lone planetary satellite incarnated upon a world that is inexorably transforming itself into a mirror of its circling offspring; as the ice walls converge across the globe in a dual drive to embrace and kiss in antarctic passion at the equatorial midpoint, a lifeless frozen expanse of bruised and curdled milk is what our self-wrought future portends. She also serves as a selenian force in the tidal effect she works upon the unnamed narrator's questing passions, ebbing and flowing in a peculiar rhythm to her proximity and looming peril; the anchor point around which he spirals in propulsive need whilst crafting obstruction points and barriers that come bearing haughty authority, cruel mood shifts, and brilliant blue diamantine chips for eyes.

In effect, we have nature's purposeful spread of an all-consuming dead whiteness acting in tandem with man's increasingly aimless and desperate violence and destruction. The world at the macro and micro levels are but reflections of each other, and the roles of nature and man as initiator and responder in this symphonically apocalyptic end game are never precisely defined. It's all of a part with Kavan's mysterious surrealism and cynosural enigmas, put down upon the page in swathes of utterly gorgeous, evocative prose. Ice is a haunted echo, and might very well prove itself one of those fictions that imprints lingering images upon one's memory—this eerie, shifting world where desire invokes impassioned pursuit and easy abandonment, where pain and pleasure are as closely conjoined as obsession and indifference, imposition and rejection, arrogance and emptiness, self-image and self-delusion, and everything seems to take on the patina of that ultimate sire of contradictions: death dressed to the Stygian nines—and its inexorable gain upon our lives with every second slipped past and away is rendered herein as the frozen encroachment of globe enshrouding ice, grinding, crushing, leveling all that lies in its path; a stiller of breathing ways alternating between a monochromatic, ghostly luminescence that ignites bones to phosphorescence and a cosmic darkness in which the least flickering trace of light—like love, or intimacy, or hope—is remorselessly strangled. ...more

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Jan 10, 2013 Ema rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: magical-and-surreal, british, female-authors, read-in-2013, netraduse

Edit (104 days later): Despite my initial 3 star rating, I feel compelled to give this book another star. I must admit that Ice is still haunting me, as some of the strong images it aroused are still vivid in my mind. Few books have this power over me.

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While I found Ice to be an interesting read, with moments of pure beauty and originality, in the end I was glad it was over, because it had failed to keep me under its spell for its entirety. While being a short book, to me ...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Brian rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommended to Brian by: s.penkevich

This book is a literary haunting. Its taut, hallucinatory sentences and apocalyptic subject matter infect the reader with a desperation that lingers long after the book is finished. Several days after completing this novel I unwittingly see the landscape of my City swallowed in a slow moving wall of ice; imagining familiar places and vistas seen through a dozen feet of hard-edged ice. Is the protagonist's search for the girl an allegory of humankind's yearning for and then spurning of the soul ...more

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topics	posts	views	last activity
500 Great Books B...: Ice - Anna Kavan - Fionnuala	4	40	Jun 30, 2015 10:37AM
Brain Pain: Discussion - Week One - Ice - Chapter 1 - 7	20	63	Nov 30, 2014 10:36PM
Brain Pain: Discussion - Week Two - Ice - Chapter 8 - 15	26	41	Mar 11, 2014 09:11PM

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