Ice: Anna Kavan (Penguin Science Fiction)

This book was originally classified as science fiction, but it hardly seems so today when rapid ecological decline is a fact, and democratic institutions have turned sinister and controlling. The novel is complex and open to interpretation. I find it to be almost unbearably brutal with themes of male dominance expressed in the need to control and destroy. The brutality is slightly tempered by symbolic passages that are often of great beauty. Anna Kavan is a master of English prose and this book requires close reading. She was a great favorite of Doris Lessing who championed her work and argued that Kavan was a writer of importance and had much to offer contemporary readers. She deserves more readers. You should be one of them.

This is a dark tale of obsession told against the backdrop of war and the apocalyptic encroachment of snow and ice. We are not directly told the cause of these disasters, and it doesn't matter. Rather, the story is told through the determined, and sometimes hallucinatory eyes of a man on a fevered and quasi-erotic mission to possess the recalcitrant young woman of his obsession. It is here, amid a teetering psychology which mirrors that of the collapsing world order, that the meaningful action of this short novel takes place.Throughout Kavan masterfully conveys a feeling of dread and naked will amidst absurdity. This is not feel good story, yet the writing is intriguing enough to keep the reader engaged. It transcends categorisation. It is worth your time but, if you're like me, you'll be glad when it's over.

“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.” - Ice.An unnamed narrator and a man only known as the warden search for an elusive girl in a frozen, seemingly post-nuclear, apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organization. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair.This was my classic pick for the month of August. In all honesty, I don’t remember where or how I found out about this book, but I am glad I did. In this story, we follow an unnamed narrator as he tries to track down and save this girl. He follows her throughout this snowy, apocalyptic, and war-torn world to try to free her from the warden while also trying to run from the ice that is taking over the Earth. Overall, this book was so strange. I think “hallucinatory” is a good way to describe it because the narrator is extremely unreliable, and sometimes it is hard to tell what is real or imagined. The writing and landscape in this novel are bleak, cold, and fairly to the point, although, the plot itself is quite sprawling. What I find more interesting is the author, Anna Kavan, and how her struggles in life (strained parental relationships, bad marriages, mental health, and heroin abuse) show up and inform her writing. I am definitely interested in reading more of her novels and short stories since I have heard many praises about them.

Ice was recommended to me by a friend who understands my taste in fiction. It was a cold read; literally cold at times. The writing was bleak and oddly heartfelt. The grim inevitability of the looming apocalypse tinged then narrative with a grim nihilism. If you dig Thomas Ligotti, Robert Chambers or the like, check this one out. I look forward to exploring more of her work.

I started reading this quite a while ago and ended up putting it aside because I couldn't "gel" with it. I came back to it two days ago and ended up "falling" into this haunting, desolate and surreal story. The picture of a bleak and fragmented apocalyptic world is vivid and uncompromising, but it is the relationship between the unstable narrator, the sinister "warden and the waif like and ethereal "girl" which is fascinating and compelling reading ..........and then there is the ice.The novel itself is written with a sense of urgency, pervading doom. I can't give this novel any higher accolades, except to say that 5 stars doesn't seem enough. A story that will haunt your peace of mind.

Detailed, The Warden is a layered villain. The narrator at first seems not much different from his rival at times. The girl is fragile and a tsundere with an abusive backstory.Ending is abrupt, had imagined the ending being more fantastic. The post ending details which parts of The narrator’s tellings we should hold in skepticism. The character’s are layered and the ELE Ice closing in make the novel more exciting.

A year ago I would have enjoyed this story but not totally believed or recognized its relevance. In today’s ecologically myopic, COVid-riddled world I can see how a civilization can come to this. The book may have been written to tell the story of a man’s obsession, but the world created to house his obsession is strangely right on target with the direction our society seems to be heading. I’m hoping a lesson can be learned.

Anna Kavan’s disconcertingly cold novel speaks about a world overridden by an icy-apocalypse. Unlike the hardcore Sci-Fi fictions, Kavan edges around the psycho-social subtleties of the characters she creates. She creates a fractured world where the border between the identity of the violent and the victim overlaps, threatens to merge and becomes obscure in the blizzard, in the inexorable snowfall. One might find close similarity with Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. More than the danger, its imminence becomes the hazard that overhangs. Ice is not the aftermath of an apocalyptic fallout but the repercussions of the confusion that precedes the impending doom. Like the Kafkaesque menace that overlooks the narrative, the characters are lost in the delirium of the plot, nightmarelike hallucinations and mass hysteria that keeps an aggressive mob preoccupied from the onrushing disaster. The ice becomes a spectral phenomenon complementing the coldness of our cruelty. The novel revolves around a girl, brittle and as fragile as glass, trying to escape the clutches of her ‘guardians’ who threaten her very being. Ghostlike, she is haunted by the ice, by the battlements of a patriarchal society, by the heroic gestures of her ‘guardians’ and even by the promise of a remission. The frost is all that remains and coldness is all that there is. The ice is hauntological. Escape becomes an impasse when even nature turns unjust. Respite gets buried in the snowdrifts. It is the ice that reflects our anatomy of coldness through the fracture of its refractions.Unsettling and incredibly sad, Kavan’s Ice is a terrific and brutal read about desolation within and disaster without.

ICE, a obra-prima da inglesa Anna Kavan (née Helen Emily Woods) completa 50 anos – uma edição comemorativa acaba de ser lançada, pela Penguin americana; no Brasil, o livro está esgotado, mas é possível encontrar em sebos – e se mostra tão atual quanto necessário. Mais do que isso, a autora toca em temas que, nesse meio século, ganharam projeção e se tornaram fundamentais, como catástrofes climáticas e abuso emocional contra mulheres.O cenário de Ice, como indica o título, é um mundo tomado por neve. Pouco se sabe sobre o cataclismo glacial, mas pouco se sabe como isso se deu – não importa. A trama é narrada por um homem sem nome que se diz soldado e explorador em busca de uma antiga paixão, a quem se refere como “a garota de vidro” com cabelo prateado. Pouco se sabe sobre ela, que é vista apenas como o gélido objeto do desejo dele. Ela é uma personagem vazia, destituída de mais características a não ser aquelas que o narrador atribui a ela.Paredes de gelo estão se fechando, diminuindo cada vez mais o espaço habitável do planeta. O mundo é dominado por guardião poderoso que se torna o rival do narrador pela posse da Garota (ela é tratada assim, embora já seja adulta). Os interesses e desejos dela pouco importam para eles. Na medida em que o romance avança a disputa se torna mais acirrada, assim como os abusos que ela passa a sofrer – primeiro emocionais, e depois sexuais.Ice é um romance quase surrealista, de uma leitura dolorosa que beira o incompreensível. Não adianta tentar entender, tentar organizar a narrativa, buscar fatos concatenados. A trama é uma sucessão de fragmentos, cristais de gelo, que nem sempre se encaixam, mas uma constante permanece: o achatamento da subjetividade feminina.O escritor Jonathan Lethem, começa sua introdução na edição da Penguin dizendo: “é um livro como a lua é a lua. Só há uma.” E essa é uma característica que diversos comentaristas destacam ao longo desse meio século: Ice é único. O livro já foi definido, pelo seu editor, Peter Owen, como uma mistura entre Kafka e a série inglesa dos anos de 1960 Os Vingadores, e até isso, por mais bizarro que possa soar, faz sentido. Lethem, novamente, diz que os “primos mais próximos” que ele consegue imaginar para Ice são o romance Crash (1973), de J. G. Ballard e os filmes Alphaville (1965), de Jean-Luc Godard, e O ano passado em Marienbad (1961), de Alain Resnais. Todos mais ou menos contemporâneos, mas o livro de Kavan traz um diferencial: sua consciência sobre a posição da mulher num mundo dominado por homens.A autora morreu em 1968, pouco depois da publicação do livro, que, em inglês, nunca ficou fora de catálogo. Ela foi viciada em heroína, e seu protagonista/narrador usa drogas que o fazem ter alucinações, envolvendo a Garota, violência e pornografia. Publicado pouco antes da Segunda Onda do Feminismo, Ice conecta a política global da época – a Guerra Fria – com uma espécie de violência contra a mulher. Tudo isso embalado numa prosa experimental – o que não é pouco. O resultado é um romance estranho, quase incompreensível, mas sedutor em sua força e poder.

A powerful story set in an imaginary post nuclear world where nothing is ever what it seems. Through a landscape that is increasing in walls of ice and devastation, a man is looking for a girl who despite her fragility manages to escape the men she is running from. A surreal, compelling and unnerving read. Very original!

Interesting and different.

Rating - 3.5/5On the surface, this is a novel set in a dystopian future torn apart by never-ending war.And beneaththat surface, is the story of conscience - a picture, where characters merge and dislodge at will; a conscience, that drifts from logic and reason to whims and emotions...Ice is about to engulf the whole world and end humanity. It's the end of man, and his unquenchable thirst.It is also the dark chasm between the two sides of a man, which is ever-growing and about to engulf the whole process of thought....Anna Kavan's little book asks a lot out of the reader. It demands every ounce of concentration and presence and can potentially end up being an effort. The book is weird and unlike anything I have read previously - always delicately balanced between dream and reality, and hence, at times, becoming hard to distinguish.Having said that, it still does deserve a larger readership.Anna Kavan's writing is intense and gives a lot of food-for-thought moments, but, at a cost. Ice is not a book with a proper plot rather a commentary on the consciousness through various prop-themes....You have to taste this, as they say, "the proof of the pudding..." You know how that goes!........................................................