Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Apocalyptic, surreal, at times frightening, obsessive, brilliant. . ., 14 April 2009
`Ice' an intensely vivid story, surreal and chilling and providing the reader who is familiar with Anna Kavan with another piece in her emotional jigsaw. A sinister man known as `The Warden' is engaged in a disturbing search to locate and ultimately to control a weak and frail creature known simply as `the girl'. All the time the ice is creeping, lurking, waiting to engulf the planet which is facing a massive catastrophe.
First published in 1967 just a year before she died, but reading it today in the 21st century it is potent and apocalyptic. Perhaps not the best novel to begin reading the works of Anna Kavan, `a Scarcity of Love' is a good place to begin your journey, as is `Asylum Piece' or `Julia and the Bazooka'. Having read those you will be as hooked on her writing as all those in her growing cult following.
Anna Kavan will appeal to lovers of the works of Sylvia Plath and her fluid prose is of that same high order.
To read Anna Kavan's novels is to enter a world in which loneliness, despair and emotional turmoil blend into one personal sphere. A world of troubled childhood, failed relationships, mental illness and the frailties of the human condition merge into a huge emotional cloud. When you become acquainted with her magical writing, it will become clear that so much of what she writes is autobiographical. She writes in the slipstream genre and in her intense prose, one can feel her pain, enter her troubled mind and the kaleidoscope of her often tortured emotions.
Anna Kavan died in London in December 1968, the year of the summer of love. She lived a troubled life, becoming a heroin addict in around 1926. We tend to think of such an addiction as a modern problem, but she experienced it over 80 years ago.
She suffered intermittently with mental illness, and her style of writing changed, as did a change in her appearance and life-style after a mental breakdown. It was around this time that she adopted the name of Anna Kavan, taken from a character with whom she identified in one of her early novels "Let Me Alone".
Lifelong she suffered in one way or another with social problems and isolation and towards the end of her life she became anti-social and a virtual recluse. She had few real friends, endured a lifetime of suicide attempts and the heroin addiction, a life which is poignantly and vividly reflected in her writing.
Her novels are as fresh, alive and as in tempo with the current age as they were when she wrote them.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Liberating in its bizarreness, 30 Dec 2007
'Ice' is a wonderfully strange and surreal book. It is set in an apocalyptic time, where some sort of ice age is descending upon the Earth and war rages throughout the world. No time is wasted with explanations, everything is carefully vague and non-specific. Even the characters remain unnamed.
Completely free of all the usual conventions, reading 'Ice' is rather liberating. There is no need to worry about the plot, about characterisation, about realism. Things just are as they are, and you read in the moment, enjoying the writing as it stands without thinking about what comes before and after. And the writing is good enough to enjoy for its own sake.
Some readers may wish to find allegories or deeper meaning in the story, but I preferred not to. Certainly there would be material for discussion in the book, although Kavan is so carefully vague, avoiding any sort of explanations, that almost any interpretation could be validly argued. I liked the fact that I didn't feel as though I needed to understand or find an underlying 'message' in the work.
Sometimes 'Ice' is confusing, with dream-like sequences that occur without any warning or explanation, and it is often impossible to know if the action being described is 'real time' or has moved seamlessly into fantasy, dream, prophecy or flashback. It can be disconcerting but it works surprisingly well once you accept that it is a feature of the book.
As long as you are prepared for its strangeness, I think 'Ice' is an excellent book to read. Expect to be confused and occasionally lose the thread. Don't expect to find explanations, a set plot, or realistic events. Once you understand the ground rules of 'Ice' (i.e. there are no rules) you can sit back and enjoy the ride. I suspect that some people may dislike it - it is certainly disconcerting and unusual - but it's not a long book and I think it would be well worth a try for anyone who is prepared to read something a bit different.
If you enjoy 'Ice', I would recommend 'The Unconsoled' by Kazuo Ishiguro, and vice versa. It has the same sense of dream like surrealism and unreality.
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3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfection, 26 Mar 2002
By A Customer
Forget plot, forget character, geography, politics, motivation, development.This is a lengthy dream sequence - characters come and go, everything is fluid. The nature of the catastrophe becomes irrelevant - is this about holocaust? Gender? Opiates? Ecology? <<STUNNING>> Strangely reminds me of Murukami
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