Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.
Start by marking “Ice” as Want to Read:
Ice
by
'Few novelists match the intensity of her vision' J. G. Ballard
No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the sylph-like, silver-haired girl he loves, as she keeps running - away from her husba ...more
No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the sylph-like, silver-haired girl he loves, as she keeps running - away from her husba ...more
Get A Copy
Paperback, 01 edition, 182 pages
Published
November 2nd 2017
by Penguin Classics
(first published 1967)
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
Reader Q&A
To ask other readers questions about
Ice,
please sign up.
Popular Answered Questions
Jennifer
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas. A Norwegian modern classic centering around a frozen waterfall in Norway in the fjords – dreamlike and haunting.
This book is not yet featured on Listopia.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
Showing 1-30

Start your review of Ice

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 slende ...more

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 slende ...more

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
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 ...more
‘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 ...more

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
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

''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 ...more
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 ...more

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

Posted at Heradas
It’s 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 isn’t present, only to snap right back to our protagonist’s perspective as if nothing happened. Although, maybe he was actually there the whole time, he’s not really sure himself. Sometimes, mid-book, his character tak ...more
It’s 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 isn’t present, only to snap right back to our protagonist’s perspective as if nothing happened. Although, maybe he was actually there the whole time, he’s not really sure himself. Sometimes, mid-book, his character tak ...more

May 05, 2018
Robin
rated it
really liked it
Recommends it for:
dark dreamers
Recommended to Robin by:
Fede
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 diso ...more
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 diso ...more

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
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

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 we’re in for a real bad freeze-up.’ Most of my life
...more

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 brill
...more

Dec 20, 2020
mark monday
rated it
it was amazing
·
review of another edition
Recommended to mark by:
s.penkevich
What does the future of the world hold for us little humans? Let us take a look.
The weapons of the atom deployed. The nations of men in battle. Borders and boundaries blurred, broken, crossed, lines drawn as if in the sand and just as easily erased. The small towns and villages suffer first, as always, but the cities and then countries will follow and fall. The world turns hot then cold, its people huddle and flee, the walls of ice encroach: a return to old forms, a slow domination by the wo ...more

The weapons of the atom deployed. The nations of men in battle. Borders and boundaries blurred, broken, crossed, lines drawn as if in the sand and just as easily erased. The small towns and villages suffer first, as always, but the cities and then countries will follow and fall. The world turns hot then cold, its people huddle and flee, the walls of ice encroach: a return to old forms, a slow domination by the wo ...more

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 ...more
I need to talk about how I dream, if I am to convey the essence here. I ...more

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
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 totall
...more

Foreword, by Jonathan Lethem
--Ice
Afterword, by Kate Zambreno
--Ice
Afterword, by Kate Zambreno

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 publisher ...more
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 publisher ...more

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 de ...more
I have not been reading much lately, mostly due to a perk of my new-ish job being a de ...more

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
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

Luminous in the Dark
Early on, the male narrator discloses to us, "Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me."
It’s 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, ...more
Early on, the male narrator discloses to us, "Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me."
It’s 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, ...more

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.

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 t ...more

This is on my short list for all-time favorite novel, and yet I can't properly explain why that is. It doesn't exactly feature a thrilling plot or even relatable characters, but the overall feel of the novel is so uniquely strange and disorienting that I'm entirely absorbed anyway, similar to (as others have mentioned) watching a David Lynch film. I find myself revisiting certain sections pretty often, just to envelop myself in the cold, hallucinatory world of the narrator, who shifts in an out
...more

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
...more

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 n ...more
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 n ...more

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 lasti
...more

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 c ...more
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 c ...more

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 fr
...more

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 ...more
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 ...more

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" ...more
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" ...more

Oct 01, 2012
Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness)
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 h ...more
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 h ...more

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

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 s
...more
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
---|---|---|---|---|
500 Great Books B...: Ice - Anna Kavan - Fionnuala | 4 | 42 | Jun 30, 2015 10:37AM | |
Brain Pain: Discussion - Week One - Ice - Chapter 1 - 7 | 20 | 66 | Nov 30, 2014 10:36PM | |
Brain Pain: Discussion - Week Two - Ice - Chapter 8 - 15 | 26 | 42 | Mar 11, 2014 09:11PM |
Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents.
Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psycholo ...more
Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psycholo ...more
News & Interviews
Need another excuse to treat yourself to a new book this week? We've got you covered with the buzziest new releases of the day.
To create our...
27 likes · 5 comments
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
“Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.”
—
40 likes
“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.”
—
24 likes
More quotes…