Tremendously odd book. I don't even know if I enjoyed it, really, despite my four stars - it's just such a surreal narrative, such that I admire what it's doing and recognize that (were I interested in doing so) it would reward a lot of Literary Analysis, while never really knowing what was going on exactly. But that is, almost certainly, the point. It feels like one of Kazuo Ishiguro's weirder novels, or if some space alien like Clarice Lispector decided to write a "science fiction" book.

I don't really know what to do with a NetGalley review of an old book in a new edition. I'm not breaking new ground talking about a more than 50 year old story; perhaps I am meant to comment on the new "value added," that is to say, the new edition's foreword? Yet I'm not sure if my ebook copy was correct, there. The Goodreads entry for this edition claims that there is a foreword by Jeff VanderMeer, but the foreword in mine was by Neil Gaiman. Unclear what's going on there and I don't have much to say about it anyway.

I had not heard of Anna Kavan before picking this book up, and am now very interested in her life and career! I picked this book up because of how compelling the synopsis was, especially in today's world and environment, and found myself pleasantly surprised by the novel. I'm not into science fiction usually, but it's through novels like these, which was constructed and written well, that I think we can interrogate the world around us more, even when its setting seems to be a far-off world.

It's certainly a book to read on cold winter days. The story feels like a nightmare, but a gorgeously written one. You can sense the ice-cold setting through the pages, and it's terrifying. The writing is very fragmented and dreamlike, so it's probably best to read the book at least twice to understand the author's idea. I was also surprised by how relevant it is to our current times with all the climate change and human reaction to the catastrophe topics. The prose is heavy, and it's noticeable, that the author wrote it not long before her death.

However, I struggled to connect with the characters. Although I understand they are meant to be cold and distant, the narrator is awful in his obsession, and the heroine feels one-dimensional. While I can't say I liked this book, I agree that it's a literary interesting piece of literature and a must-read.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for sending me a free e-copy. All opinions are my own.

3.5/5

Ice is a 1960s sci-fi/speculative fiction classic that’s been on my to-read list for a while. My interest in it is largely tied to the author, Anna Kavan, her life story is as haunting as her writing. She spent time in and out of psychiatric institutions and struggled with heroin addiction, which ultimately led to her death. Ice was her final book, published just a year before she died of an overdose. Knowing this adds a powerful layer to how the book is read and understood.

I can see why many dislike or struggle with this novel, it’s definitely not for everyone. The writing is fragmented and dreamlike, blending hallucination, memory, and reality in a disorienting way. I found the beginning particularly difficult, but once I realised the narrator was unreliable I was able to let go of trying to interpret it too literally and just experience the atmosphere.

To me, the unnamed girl, one of the central characters, seems to represent Kavan herself, or at least her inner world. She exists in a cold, brutal, hyper-masculine landscape where she is constantly dehumanised, moved around like an object, stripped of autonomy, and subjected to psychological and physical torment. She clearly does not want to be in this world, and the apocalyptic ice engulfing the earth feels like both an escape and a metaphor for her desire to disappear. Through this lens, the novel’s brilliance and haunting beauty become all the more apparent.

Thank you to Pushkin Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Incredible sci fi republished, I highly recommend this. It’s deeply unsettling but also beautiful and atmospheric on a cerebral level. Should be required reading.

A journey through an unsparing hallucinogenic dystopia
—
If there is one classic of science fiction that can never be bettered or aped or repeated, this might be one of them. (Another is Samuel R. Delany’s similarly uncategorisable Dhalgren.) A science fiction book where the science is nowhere to be seen, it is instead a surreal elision of dystopian vision, dreams and flashbacks, set in a world and a time that is neither past nor future and certainly not the present.

The unnamed narrator pursues the girl, thwarted and aided in turn by the same forbidding man, sometimes named the warden, while an impending catastrophe nears, somewhat military in nature, but always presaged by the ice, ice in all its forms: hail and sleet and glaciers that come alive; even as the narrator—who is probably a man—flees through daydreams and night terrors into past encounters between the three, or into scenes at which the narrator could have no first hand experience. Time is uncertain, no definite months, days, hours or minutes. Seasons pass from one paragraph to the next, and the place is unknown, a country somewhere in the north but where the ice is never this severe.

The book is remarkable in the way Kavan keeps up the uncertainty, jinking and lurching between the narrator, the girl and the warden, never offering a sense of solid ground that tells you what this novel is about or where it’s going. A superlative performance on the page with rivals in film and television, but never in quite as bravura a text.

Four and a half stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for the ARC.

I think I've heard of this before in my public library, but I never actually picked it up until I got approved to read this new edition. The setting, the events that take place, are all malleable for the narrator's sake of possessing the young woman but possessing her in a very specific state of despair. The narrative suggests a globe-trotting adventure against a despotic leader who keeps the woman locked up, but the details change regularly, there's very little sense of time, and you get the sense that the narrator and the villain are one and the same. Though even this is just my opinion; the writing lends itself to many interpretations. I personally enjoyed this sort of unreal narrative, but I can also see how it can frustrate someone who just wants something concrete to latch onto here.

Anna Kavan forever. Read Julia & the Bazooka next, then Asylum Piece, then I am Lazarus. In fact, these should all be back in print like Ice! Thank you for the ARC, and do consider giving Julia & the Bazooka the deluxe publishing it deserves.

If you like Murakami books then you might like this book.

There are only three main characters, a woman, her husband and a man who is in search of her. None are named. The place they live in isn't named and yet the book is captivating (atleast once you cross at least 10pages because, let's be honest, 10 pages in we are just wondering wtf is happening).

Once you know the background of the author, this book makes more sense. She was of a rich background, travelled the world, used to take heroin for her back pain, her son died in a war, she had a mental breakdown and she wrote in the times of WW2.

The pain, actually, the never ending pain showsup quite a bit in the book. If I am to think it in that way then this book is about discovering yourself while the world freezes over.

This is a strange book and I’m not sure I’ll be able to describe it adequately! It’s probably not something I would normally have chosen to read, but this new edition from Pushkin Press caught my eye and as I’ve enjoyed other books from their Classics range, I decided to try it.

Ice was first published in 1967, the last of Anna Kavan’s books to be published before her death a year later. It follows an unnamed narrator who has developed an obsession with a pale young woman with silver-white hair. The girl is also unnamed and described as delicate, glass-like and under the control of her sinister husband, who later becomes known as ‘the Warden’. Our narrator pursues her from place to place, hoping to rescue her from the Warden, occasionally catching up with her and then losing her again. There’s not much more to the plot than that – Christopher Priest in his foreword to this edition calls the novel ‘virtually plotless’ – but the book still has multiple layers that make it an interesting and worthwhile read.

First, there’s the setting. The narrator’s pursuit of the white-haired girl takes place against a backdrop of apocalyptic scenes as the planet rapidly becomes engulfed by ice. I’ve seen this referred to as an allegory of Anna Kavan’s own addiction to heroin, although I don’t know enough about her to comment on that. It could also be seen as a warning of climate change, more relevant than ever today, of course. Either way, there are some beautiful descriptive passages as Kavan writes about the coldness, the glittering snow and the giant walls of ice closing in on the girl, the narrator and the world.

Another notable thing about the novel is the way the reader (and the narrator himself) can never be quite sure of the boundaries between reality and a dreamlike or hallucinatory state. Sometimes the girl will appear seemingly from nowhere, just out of reach or about to be enclosed by the ice – only to disappear again just as suddenly, leaving us wondering whether she was ever really there at all. These shifts in reality occur repeatedly throughout the book, which is very unsettling! The Warden also never feels entirely real, but is always there as a threatening, oppressive presence; the narrator sees himself as trying to free the girl from the other man’s control, but his own infatuation with her gradually begins to feel just as disturbing.

In the foreword, Priest describes the book as ‘slipstream’, which Wikipedia defines as ‘speculative fiction that blends together science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction, or otherwise does not remain within conventional boundaries of genre and narrative’. It’s certainly not a conventional novel and I have to be honest and say that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped to – after the first few appearances and disappearances of the girl, I began to find it repetitive – but it’s also a unique and powerful one. The cold, icy imagery will stay with me for a long time.

Another whacky mind fuck of a book. Just when you start to understand or think you understand whats happening it turns into cluelessness. It literally feels like you're reading a bunch of crazy confusing dreams centred around these characters, I admit I probably didn't like this as much as I probably would have had I not just read another mindfucky book.
Other than that this was a fun book it's a really interesting world and style of writing.

Thank you Net Galley for the ARC!!

Unfortunately I just couldn't get into this book. Even at the finish I was just unsure what I just read. Turns out maybe this genre isn't for me despite my best efforts!

I was really hoping to enjoy this read. It sounded like it was right up my alley but alas, it was not for me. I found it to be confusing and haphazard, which was obviously intentional but it hopped between what feels like reality and dreaming too often for it to make much sense to my mind.

After I read about the author being a heroin addict, it actually made me think I was reading a bad trip about how the author was stuck in this world of ice, which in my mind became the heroin, and the women that kept being glimpsed, was actually glimpses of herself stuck in her addiction, unable to find a way out, and the man searching for her, was herself. Basically all the characters in the book being iterations of herself. Which if that was intentional, is pretty clever.

If this is your jam, then you may enjoy this.


Thank you to the publishers for sending me a copy of this book to read and review. It is greatly appreciated.

This is an older book that is being reissued. It is a post-apocalyptic dystopia and it reads like a fever dream. Or maybe just a regular dream. It is beautiful in its own right. A man is chasing a woman that he used to love in the hopes of saving her from impending doom. There is ice taking over the world and she seems to have fallen in with a bad individual. I'm not sure which of these scenarios is worse, but the narrators obsession with her is palpable. I definitely thought it was worth reading and it's a fairly short book.

Lost and confused are two godd words describing me when I read this. I had no idea what was going on at most time. It's probably the point with the writing and plot but it's not for me. I need something in the plot och character to hold on to and here it feels a bit like I'm free falling and don't know where or when I will land.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for thos eARC in exchange for my honest opinion. All words are my own.

This is a surreal book with many dream sequences, or hallucinations tossed in that make it hard to know what is real or not. Certainly this was purposeful, but make for uncomfortable reading experience.

The story is about an impending world ecological catastrophe covering the plant with artic snow and ice, meanwhile war is breaking out everywhere.

None of the characters or places are named. The narrator has these awful dreams about this woman, sometimes they seem to be waking visions of what happened, but he couldn’t actually know this. He is compelled to find her, save her from the other man (her husband) or the impending emergency. She has no say in her life, by either man. It is an uncomfortable read.

An unnamed man is chasing after an unnamed woman who has kind of an ethereal quality to her. At the same time, the world is changing rapidly into an ice hell due to (nuclear?) war. Humans are fighting and destroying the planet and the man obsessively hunts for this girl.

This type of writing is called slipstream, which is also the phenomenon that happens when you view the world through a warm haze or fumes from a car. The world kind of distorts and wobbles, and it’s hard to make out what is real and not. And boy, does it take you for a trip!

Ice is disturbing and difficult, but in a way that works really well. Following the narrator’s thoughts is kind of like slipping into the mind of someone with a severe split personality disorder. At times our main man seems to not know what’s real himself, but despite all this, he is vividly experiencing and feeling what we see on the page. It’s quite masterful.

I liked the dark aspects of the book. This is the brain of a highly disturbed man with no hope of salvation. It shows.

Due to the nature of the narrator the book is sometimes hard to follow and requires a bit of focus. At the same time, we’re just kind of along for the ride so it’s ok to be that too.

Read if: You like unique books that requires brain activity and allows for several different interpretations.

Don’t read if: You check trigger warning before every book. This is dark and violent at times.

“Ice” – Anna Kavan

“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.”

My thanks to @pushkinpress and @netgalley for my copy of this book in exchange for a review.

What a strange, engrossing read this was. Published in 1967, “Ice” is a surreal, apocalyptic novel where nothing is truly certain, save that the end is near. An unnamed narrator arrives in a country that is slowly becoming engulfed in ice, much like the rest of the world. Society is breaking down, as is seemingly the sanity of the narrator, and his only clear goal is to find and rescue a white-haired girl, someone he once loved, now in the clutches of a sinister Warden and his accomplices.

Reality is an unknown quantity in this book. The narrative constantly shifts and melts, no one is reliable in their accounts, and characteristics suddenly appear halfway through the book that only confuse the reader more. It’s a highly metaphorical book, although of what seems to be debated – previous interpretations involving the real life addiction problems of Kavan seem to have given way to those that see issues of male power and abuse, coupled with obvious climate change fears.

For me, it could be a combination of both. I was struck by the line below:

“Six guards brought her to him, bundled up in a soldier’s cloak. These men had been taught a trick of grasping that left no bruises. I had never learnt it, did not see how it was done”.

I think that could be read straight up as a scene or violence, or an allegory of hiding the physical marks of intravenous drugs. Just a thought.

This is a chilling book, one of a style that I wouldn’t normally enjoy, but this really hooked me from the moment I started it. A classic of strange sci-fi, absolutely worth seeking out!

A spooky early literary horror novel set in a near future where the world is in the process of sliding into the next Ice Age and a man's attempt to rescue a young woman as a favor to the local man in charge. Dark, spooky, and the isolation between our characters grow even as they're closer than ever. Absolutely gorgeous read from the end of an author's life and work.

My favorite genre is magical realism, so I do believe this book's slipstream-ness was made for audiences like me. I almost enjoyed this MORE than magical realism because it seemed intent on destroying reality, rather than maintaining it. It was enjoyable trying to figure out what parts were reality and what Kavan was trying to say during the parts that were a destruction of reality. I wish I had read this back in the day in a literature class though, because I think I would have benefited much more from having a teacher help me dig through it more deeply through to it's meaning.

Thank you! I really enjoyed this one. And I always appreciate when publishers bring back books from history.