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Ice: 50th Anniversary Edition
Ice: 50th Anniversary Edition
Ice: 50th Anniversary Edition
Audiobook5 hours

Ice: 50th Anniversary Edition

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive "glass-girl" with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, a Kafkaesque literary dreamscape, and a brilliant allegory for its author's struggles with addiction-all crystallized in prose glittering as the piling snow.

Kavan's 1967 novel has built a reputation as an extraordinary and innovative work of literature, garnering acclaim from China Mieville, Patti Smith, J. G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, and Doris Lessing, among others. With echoes of dystopian classics like Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and J. G. Ballard's High Rise, Ice is a necessary and unforgettable addition to the canon of science fiction classics.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 27, 2018
ISBN9781977373649
Ice: 50th Anniversary Edition

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Reviews for Ice

Rating: 3.8476702218637997 out of 5 stars
4/5

279 ratings19 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    When I was a kid I sometimes had the sudden fear that I could be trapped by or overwhelmed by something, usually something beautiful, and that's what Ice reminded me of, like holding a pale blue multifaceted ball up to the heavy sunlight and feeling as though I might unravel into the flat refracted color.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The imagery was hard to understand at times but the relationship between the characters in fascinating. I had hoped in the end the girl would become independent. There were flashes of it but in the end she was the type of girl the protagonist wanted. As if his own ego depended on it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is personal and subjective and reductive and impressionistic and every other kind of thing I can use to say "meaningful to me, but not maybe to you," and also totally unfair to this incredible book, which is a feminist landmark and an opium high in word form (and how many books can say both of those things???), but for me, I was reading the last chapter of Ice when the news came over that David Bowie had died, and that's what reading this book will always feel like to me: the way it feels when David Bowie dies. It fit, and was perfect. If your brain's in a good place, or if it's in a bad place and you think looking the darkness in the face with a companion who can find mystery and equanimity in the universal awful and the end of all things might help, read Ice.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I guess you would need to be high like the author in order to appreciate it. It is indeed surreal and dream like as well as very hard to follow. Also creepy that this guy keeps tracking his love who he continually refers to as girl like. Sigh
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Cold, fiery, dreamlike, crushing. An unexpected surprise of a strangeness.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An unnamed narrator pursues an unnamed woman through a world ravaged by war and destruction and slowly succumbing to a wall of ice that is covering the planet. A unique, violent, vivid hallucination in cold, sharp and dangerous prose.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great psychological / geological dystopia for COVID-times. Although introduced as Kafkaesque or as having a dreamlike narrative, I found it had a haunting, authentic voice.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I wasn't liking this at all and then all of a sudden something clicked, I did a 180 and then really enjoyed it. Unique. The writing is direct and driving. It's almost like a zombie film, what with the relentless pursuit of the ice.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    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 coming and I should think about my lemurs -- but wait, I risk my neck again and pursue my other half, even if she can't stand to be in the same time zone. I was fortunate to watch Fassbinder's World on a Wire the other day and despite toying with the same tropes, Fassbinder's film never flinched nor felt out of step. This did, unfortunately.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was such a surreal story about an unnamed narrator obsessively pursuing an ethereal girl through a dying world being engulfed by ice. I loved the writing but the meaning didn't click for me. I think is about the losing struggle against hopelessness? Or maybe I see depression in it because it's reflecting the depression in me, and how fitting that a book called Ice would reflect. I would have to read this again, I think.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    “Numerous potential meanings of the film's events have been put forward: that it is a version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth; that it represents the relationship between patient and psychoanalyst; that it all takes place in the woman's mind; that it all takes place in the man's mind, and depicts his refusal to acknowledge that he has killed the woman he loved that the characters are ghosts or dead souls in limbo; etc.Some have noted that the film has the atmosphere and the form of a dream, that the structure of the film may be understood by the analogy of a recurring dream, or even that the man's meeting with the woman is the memory (or dream) of a dream…The film continually creates an ambiguity in the spatial and temporal aspects of what it shows, and creates uncertainty in the mind of the spectator about the causal relationships between events….The woman insists they have never met. A second man, who may be the woman's husband, repeatedly asserts his dominance over the first man, including beating him several times at a mathematical game (a version of Nim). Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships among the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places……..”(from wiki’s description of Last Year at Marienbad)Last Year at Marienbad a film by Alain Robbe-Grillet was released in 1961. It was shot in Black and white in a peculiar and stylised way. It took place almost wholly in a chateau and the three protagonists are never named. Ice by Anna Kavana kept leading me to this film especially the first part: some of which takes place in the Citadel. It also made me think of The Castle by Kafka and later on; when the Ice destroys the world of a dystopia by J G Ballard. What is common to them all is a distance from the characters, the reader or filmgoer sees them through the lens of the author/auteur, they inhabit a world of nightmares of events charged with mystery. The motives, the obsessions of the characters are never fully explained, there are hints from the past, and we know that their future is without hope. They are caught on a pin for our inspection and we are never made to feel their emotions. They are unable to communicate effectively with each other as they hurtle towards their doom. They are victims.However what sets Ice apart is that the main theme of Kavan's book is victimisation. The waif like ghost of a woman is a victim, she is at the mercy of the passions of the two men, she can never really escape them, they will always come for her, they will take her against her will, they will hold her in their custody, they will use violence and their pursuit of her will be relentless. The introduction to my edition of the novel is written by Christopher Priest who while acknowledging that Anna Kavan suffered from heroin addiction is unequivocal in saying that the Ice is not a metaphor for heroin addiction. I am not so sure that he is right about this. The novel has an other worldly feel about it, perhaps because it was written by a woman who was addicted it feels kind of druggy. However if you link the idea of the junkie as victim then I can see a correlation. Kavan does an excellent job of holding the book together; her short sentences gives it the feel of a film script, but a script that contains some brilliant descriptions of the Ice and the war torn towns. It is told largely in the first person by the man who is searching for the girl, but changes perspective for events that he cannot have known about. Kavan continually plays with the readers perceptions, how much is a dream? how much are flashbacks? are the two male characters the same person?, but she does it in such a way that she does not lose the reader. This is not a difficult book to read, in fact I could hardly put it down. It packs a lot in its 150 pages and has an atmosphere, a mystery, and a coldness that made me feel the ice. Black and white, mainly grey, a film noir of a book, to be read when it is pouring of rain or better when the snow is falling. Great stuff 4.5 stars
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Other than that time I had open heart surgery in the next-to-last year of the Twentieth Century and, afterwards, in my recovery, was prescribed powerful opioids to manage the impossible throbbing pain from the incision, reading Ice by Anna Kavan is the closest I've ever come to being a junkie. Classic though it is, Junky's got nothing on Ice when it comes to having a vicarious experience of what the long term hallucinatory effects of using heroin must be like upon one's psyche. Sorry, William S. B., you know I still love you. Ice is a consummate downer. It is major clinical depression — and maybe madness — incarnate, a deep freeze of the mind and spirit that is somehow resurrected as a phoenix ablaze in the preternatural imagination of Anna Kavan, who projects her cold conflagration out into the (un)natural world. Ice burns its images, it's searing insanity, into the deepest crevices of your mind — a dry ice novel if there ever was one, as smoke and snowflakes waft a-spiraling from its peculiar pages. But it is a beautiful, brittle, burning world, imagined by Anna Kavan; her physical and psychological chaotic cosmos, an optical illusion, ruined by cold explosions of luminous, fiery ice. My God there are so many different ways you could interpret the unnamed narrator's stark perceptions of her inner and outer worlds. She defines it for us in a line: "Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me". I can't help wondering, hearing her take on "reality," if perhaps the "she" narrating the grim journey has dissociated, and the woman she meets early on in the novel at the "fort on the hill" is really a projection of herself rather than a separate individual? In other words, the unnamed "Her" she seeks in the novel could be a simple, but complex (and I suspect ultimately hopeless) search for herself, perhaps? Maybe. Maybe not. Ambiguity reigns in Ice. Interpretations are open-ended. Reality and delusion are so well blended they've become something else entirely, but what? A "hybrid state of being," as an online friend — Zenomax — who was also reading the book at the same time I was, coined it, with an ability to see what most of us cannot — a lucid delusion perhaps?"Ice had already engulfed the forest, the last ranks of trees were splintering. Her silver hair touched my mouth, she was leaning against me. Then I lost her; my hands could not find her again. A snapped-off tree trunk was dancing high in the sky, hurled up hundreds of feet by the impact of the ice. There was a flash, everything was shaken. My suitcase was lying open, half-packed, on the bed. The windows of my room were still wide open, the curtains streamed into the room. Outside the treetops were streaming. . . ."What do you make of that? Her voice, the narrator's of Ice, estranged from any recognizable reality I've ever seen, is reminiscent to me of many of the unhinged, anxiety ridden, narrators in Asylum Piece and Other Stories, who weren't so much "mad" I think, as they were erroneously and so often maliciously diagnosed by their "caretakers" or wardens, but more likely lacking the psychological defense mechanisms that protect most "sane" persons from the intensity of their feelings and perceptions over the losses, the griefs, the addictions, and the resultant isolation that are somehow triggered and later magnified whenever they are exposed for any length of time to the simple rawness of the images and sensations produced by the outer "natural" world confining them inside a subzero and cavernous spiritual claustrophobia. A world of mental suffocation, whiteouts, disorientation, "diminishing visibility ... increasing uneasiness" creating such acute panic and paranoia that delusion and hallucinations become the understandably "sanest" refuges for this unreliable narrator in an, if we're to believe her perceptions, incomprehensible, nuclear ruined icescape.Ice, in a sentence, is a frigid death sentence; it is an abstractionist's vision of a personal post-apocalypse. Ice was Anna Kavan's last fix, a sumptuous suicide note, her frost bitten goodbye."...she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vi-brating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its in-habitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour."Poetic, alliterative passages like the one above, remind me of William Blake. Or is it Samuel Taylor Coleridge's frozen abyss in Kublai Khan I'm reminded of — or maybe both? Some online friends hereabouts have astutely suggested that Ice reminds them of the late reclusive French author, Julien Gracq. Indeed, Ice could be Chateau d'Argol set in Antarctica.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is one of the strangest books I've ever read! This dystopian/apocalyptic novella set in an ambiguous future was both mesmerizing and chilling. In the thin plot the narrator and another man--sometimes called "The Warden" are searching for "The Girl", a waif-like creature with silvery-white hair. Encroachment of sheets of ice is covering the world little by little. A war is taking place. The story is mostly set in a Scandinavian-like country with tinges of Cold War Eastern Europe. To me it was most like Kafka, Borges, Scaramago: like series of dream images each flowing into the other. Although not an allegory, it was full of metaphors; I also feel it could have been partly autobiographical. The author had a gift with words and painted striking word-pictures.Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ice is a work far ahead of its time that features some great writing and haunting imagery. It's not perfect, but well worth reading despite its flaws.

    In this hallucinatory book the world initially appears not too different from our own, but after a few early chapters of relative normalcy you are thrown into a strange world of war, decay, and an oncoming frozen apocalypse. Reading Ice made me recall some more recent works of strange fiction like Michael Cisco's books The Divinity Student and The Narrator, Stanley Crawford's Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine, and David Ohle's Motorman, but Anna Kavan doesn't go quite as far with the strangeness in her book. Kavan clearly served as a trailblazer for these later writers, however, and I wouldn't be surprised if she inspired more than one of the authors just named. For my part I liked that Kavan didn't crank up the strangeness to the absolute maximum like some strange fiction authors do. Almost all of the book isn't too hard follow, and we are presented with a world that is partially explained- or at least enough hints are dropped that it's possible to get your bearings. This is in contrast to a writer like Kafka, where things just seem to happen, and then another thing just seems to happen, until you're left at sea. There is an exception to this, however, a point about a third of the way through Ice that features a dragon sacrifice seemed more bizarre than the rest of the book by a notable margin, but generally randomness and incomprehensibility don't reign here. There are more than a few dreamlike transitions that don't seem to arise from anything that has happened before, but part of that might have been due to how I occasionally only read a couple pages at a time, and regardless you don't stay lost for very long but find the main narrative again in only a page or two. Perhaps the most impressive thing in this book is that despite the strangeness of the world and the action, by the end the book has told a story where characters have arcs and the work reaches a precarious, but satisfying ending. Too often strange fiction has a story and characters in only the broadest sketches, favoring exploring the strangeness of the world over developing the characters and the conflict, but Kavan manages to largely dodge this pitfall (I'm not saying that there's a Stendhal level of characterizations and conflict, or anything, but it's noticeably better in that department than most slipstream fiction).

    That being said, there was one major flaw that hurt the book for me: periodically the main character will have moments of clarity where he feels the bizarre and dreamlike nature of his world, or acknowledges the unreality of it all. I'm not certain what Kavan intended these passages to do, but for me they undercut the atmosphere of the book. For one, the dreamlike nature of the book is self-evident, it doesn't need to be commented upon. For another, that dreamlike atmosphere isn't served by moments of rationality. My dreams, at least, aren't sprinkled with moments of clarity and awareness that I'm dreaming (only very rarely do I experience the latter). Calling something dreamlike therefore actually makes it feel less dreamlike to me. Another flaw is that in the beginning Kavan's writing can be academic and detached: "She had been conditioned into obedience since early childhood, her independence destroyed by systematic suppression." Luckily the writing picks up later on and is more visceral and evocative: "The frozen harbour was a grey-white expanse, dotted with black abandoned hulks, embedded immovably in the ice. Banks of solid ice edged the narrow channel of blackish water, fringed with grinning icicle-teeth. I jumped ashore, snow blew out in great fans, the launch disappeared from sight."

    Overall an interesting read, and significant for the genre of strange fiction. The moments where the main character acknowledges the strangeness and unreality of his world were a misstep in my opinion, but the book makes up for it in other ways. I'd recommend it, especially because it manages to have a satisfying ending. A word of warning: although this book is short, I found it dense. If you go in expecting a quick light read I suspect you'll be disappointed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ice is a book that is going to remain in my consciousness for a long time because it gave me one of the most unique reading experiences I've ever had. For me, this book stands as a pillar of something frightening, inspiring, and special. Yet, when I read it, I did not enjoy it. Slowly like a poison, it has crept into my bloodstream. My thoughts return to it again and again, and it feels like a hallucination from the book itself. "What are you still doing here?" I ask it. In its coldness, it gives no reply.

    It haunts me because it has shattered me--not emotionally (this book is not sentimental), but rather it has broken a dam that held back some terrible realizations and some inner darkness. (And I love it for that.)

    Like our protagonist I have become obsessed. I love it, I think. I am clearly confused, conflicted. I hunt for it now in bookstores, thinking perhaps this is the one where it has hidden from me. "Where are you?" I whisper. "Are you here?" My love, I shall bury you in the snow.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Kavan creates a nightmare world that is also reality, seamlessly shifting between a global crisis to dream fugues, from a surreal search across borders that are never defined to a man's realization that the boundaries of his identity are similarly fragile. The prose is unrivaled: it flows in and out of confusion just like the narrative's logic does.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5

    Review to follow - just wanting to avoid that good ol' genuine-intellectual backlash by choosing to sit on the counterfeit-intellectual side of the fence (again).

    And of course if you don't agree, you know what that means, don't you?
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I looked forward to reading this unusual SF story and spent some time hunting down a copy, only to realize after struggling through (it took me several weeks to read a very short book) that it was less SF or even an exploration of humanity in a "what if" situation, and more of a 60s drug influenced fever dream, full of obtuse symbols and unexplained events. The writing occasionally rose to a particular level of beauty, but mostly it felt like the author was trying to impress someone with how closely she'd studied Kafka.

    It wasn't a complete waste of time, but it was far less than I'd been lead to expect from reviews I'd read of it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This mesmerizing novel was the last of Anna Kavan's works to be published in her lifetime. Ice is set in a world threated with annihilation through war and an encroaching natural cataclysm: the world is growing colder and will soon be engulfed in ice. Kavan's unnamed narrator travels from place to place searching desperately for a girl he knew at an earlier (and presumably happier) stage of his life. For some reason many years ago he abandoned her, and the girl has since married someone else. He is hopelessly entranced by her delicate and waiflike body. But she is moody and unaffectionate. She is also under the sway of the mysterious warden, a cruel and manipulative larger than life figure who seems to influence political and military operations throughout the country where much of the action takes place, and even beyond its borders. To say that this novel is a Kafkaesque nightmare is an inadequate description of Kavan's intentions. The book is a kind of allegory, a condemnation of human meanness, rapacity, and stupidity. Mankind will be killed off by the ice or by its own warlike nature--one or the other, only time will tell. The narrator repeatedly defies death in order to reach the girl and save her, but she resists him at every turn. He is obsessed with her, but gains no satisfaction from possessing her. Ice--a novel filled with contradiction and paradox--is a virtuoso performance. Anna Kavan’s bitter personal vision produced many notable works, but Ice is undoubtedly her masterpiece.