Ice by
Anna Kavan
My rating: 2.75 of 5 stars
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. None of the characters or places are named. The story is about an impending world catastrophe that ices over the planet, meanwhile war is breaking out everywhere.
The narrator is a man who is involved in the war somehow, maybe in intelligence, it isn’t clearly explained. He is haunted by this woman who he almost asked to marry. She is portrayed as childlike, very thin, an albino with silvery white hair, and was raised in such a way that is very docile. He was careful with her, trying to gain her trust, when suddenly this other man married her. Thus the three main characters. This other man is very dominant.
The narrator has these awful dreams about the woman, sometimes they seem to be waking visions of what happened, but he couldn’t actually know this. The narrator often makes statements like “Reality had always been something of an unknown quality to me”, or “it dawned on me that this was reality and the other a dream”. Yet these statements don’t always come with the altered sequence of events.
The narrator can’t stop pursuing her, at times he feels like he is saving her from the other man, or from the imminent emergency. It is cold, snowing artic weather. He travels by boat, plane, or car, whatever means he can get. He ends up in an unnamed town, unnamed country, time and again. He always seems to get arrangements yet it usually isn’t explained how he contacts these people, how he knows to get on this boat at this specific time.
The woman seems to have no say in her life. She is roughly handled by her husband, or this other man, who seems to be her husband, but in different countries. It’s never very clear. He is kept up in a room, not able to leave. Our narrator tries over and over to get to her, to see her, and when he does she wants him to leave her alone. She is often called a girl. It’s uncomfortable to read.
Yet some of this is Kavan blending in her own life into fiction. She had two failed marriages, the men pursued her and she felt she had no say in her life. She travels around during WWII trying to escape the fighting, and this matches the book, although the female is not in control, was Kavan during this time? I don’t know enough about her biography.
The foreword placed this book into the genre of slipstream, not quite science fiction, but blending into other genres. Other authors in this category include J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Haruki Murakami to name a few. I think this (new to me) category works well. The book is sometime in an unnamed future, with an ecological world collapse, covering everything with artic snow and ice.
On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle
