Name: Ice
ISBN: 9780720612684

Anna Kavan

In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man 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. Acclaimed upon its 1967 publication as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right.

Sara Mercedes

First time I read anything by Anna Kavan, hopefully not the last. Ice was recommended to me with adequate warnings: the prose is beautiful but in the beginning it's hard to follow the story or plot. Anna Kavan's prose is incredibly accomplished and it gets better in the end. The last two chapters are hard not to quote completely to everyone around you. It's both beautiful and meaningful. For that alone, this small book is worth reading, even if one does have to withstand the confusion of the first couple of chapters.

Ice is a book about ice. Glacial as environmental collapse, as the death of ecological cycles and biospheres. Frigid emotion, as lack of empathy, cold hearts, wartime mentality, controlling relationships. Rime as covered trauma, the brittleness of one's stance, going from an opaque and composed demeanor to a shattered dependent and self-effaced state. Blizzard as depersonalization, the unreliability of narrating of one's own life and actions, the confusion of self-image. 

Ice can be both numbing and piercing and so is the flow of this plot. 

Ice is also about obsession and many perspectives on lack of control. 

"I had grown used to the feeling that I was going towards execution. It was something in the distance, an idea with which I had become familiar. Now it suddenly sprang at me, stood close at my elbow, no longer an idea, but a reality, just about to happen. It gave me a shock, a physical sensation in the pit of the stomach. The past had vanished and become nothing; the future was the inconceivable nothingness of annihilation. All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called 'now'."

The narrator and main character is kind of a foggy figure throughout the book, we don't know who he is and he himself goes through the discovery himself. If he is both the good and the bad, if he is one or two kinds of people, if he both loves and despises, if he strives or lets things be how they are. The woman is herself quite disturbing. Not for her thematic description, but because of her trauma, her pain, the way Kavan makes us feel how young and broken she is and how that in turn makes us look at the narrator himself.

As this review makes clear, I'm compelled to interpret this book metaphorically. Some people make the parallel between the whiteness and numbness of the ice with the author's heroin addiction, but I don't think stopping there makes this book justice. The obvious nuclear scare era that influences the theme still let me freely read this as an environmental collapse allegory. But more than that, I was left thinking about the woman and how, in a way, she is Earth. She's been our victim and our love. She has many scars of how we treated her, but can't stop being available for us. She's becoming as icy as the world is covered in it. The man tried to convince her everything will be fine and she pretends to accept it. She has a warden and a saviour and both (if there is a both) supposedly pretend to take care of her, much as we have been doing to our own planet. Pretending, saying, thinking, but actually never managing to do it seriously for long.

André Nóbrega

First time I read anything by Anna Kavan, hopefully not the last. Ice was recommended to me with adequate warnings: the prose is beautiful but in the beginning it's hard to follow the story or plot. Anna Kavan's prose is incredibly accomplished and it gets better in the end. The last two chapters are hard not to quote completely to everyone around you. It's both beautiful and meaningful. For that alone, this small book is worth reading, even if one does have to withstand the confusion of the first couple of chapters.

Ice is a book about ice. Glacial as environmental collapse, as the death of ecological cycles and biospheres. Frigid emotion, as lack of empathy, cold hearts, wartime mentality, controlling relationships. Rime as covered trauma, the brittleness of one's stance, going from an opaque and composed demeanor to a shattered dependent and self-effaced state. Blizzard as depersonalization, the unreliability of narrating of one's own life and actions, the confusion of self-image. 

Ice can be both numbing and piercing and so is the flow of this plot. 

Ice is also about obsession and many perspectives on lack of control. 

"I had grown used to the feeling that I was going towards execution. It was something in the distance, an idea with which I had become familiar. Now it suddenly sprang at me, stood close at my elbow, no longer an idea, but a reality, just about to happen. It gave me a shock, a physical sensation in the pit of the stomach. The past had vanished and become nothing; the future was the inconceivable nothingness of annihilation. All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called 'now'."

The narrator and main character is kind of a foggy figure throughout the book, we don't know who he is and he himself goes through the discovery himself. If he is both the good and the bad, if he is one or two kinds of people, if he both loves and despises, if he strives or lets things be how they are. The woman is herself quite disturbing. Not for her thematic description, but because of her trauma, her pain, the way Kavan makes us feel how young and broken she is and how that in turn makes us look at the narrator himself.

As this review makes clear, I'm compelled to interpret this book metaphorically. Some people make the parallel between the whiteness and numbness of the ice with the author's heroin addiction, but I don't think stopping there makes this book justice. The obvious nuclear scare era that influences the theme still let me freely read this as an environmental collapse allegory. But more than that, I was left thinking about the woman and how, in a way, she is Earth. She's been our victim and our love. She has many scars of how we treated her, but can't stop being available for us. She's becoming as icy as the world is covered in it. The man tried to convince her everything will be fine and she pretends to accept it. She has a warden and a saviour and both (if there is a both) supposedly pretend to take care of her, much as we have been doing to our own planet. Pretending, saying, thinking, but actually never managing to do it seriously for long.

First read of 2026, I started this in Aug 2025 but quickly shelved it as it’s definitely a winter read. In a world where an unexplained ice age apocalypse, warring nations and increasing unrest, one man follows his obsession with this silver-haired woman. I didn’t really like how stilted the narrative was, didn’t understand his obsession (and mistreatment and miscommunication) with her. I didn’t like how she’s portrayed as this fragile child with too-large eyes, or ungrateful woman who falls in love (safety?) with the main character in the end after he shouts at her. LOL what changed? I enjoyed Kavan’s description of ice shelves, snowstorms and glacier cliffs. Even the domestic unrest parts were gory and realistic. But that imagery of destruction wasn’t enough to salvage the rest of the book for me. 

Xiang

really hit me out of nowhere. bewildering, gross, provocative, strange book. explores different attitudes to patriarchal control in extreme circumstances. i’ve read a lot of books with an ‘unreliable narrator’ that are actually pretty straightforward but the narrator here is so vividly realised and alive. 

spec-fic tends to be utopian… if not in whole, then in parts. even in dystopic works, there’s usually some element of resistance, or some presence of the miracle, which lends to the possibility of change, or rupture. the dystopia is a failure of utopia and so it can suggest its opposite, the path that was strayed from. either the possibility, or its negative (from which arises another possibility), permits the tension of loss.

ice is twisty, torturous, unwell. it doesn’t have a present negation. it doesn’t have any other potentials. it explicitly teases possibilities in order to state, explicitly, that they’re impossible. this total eclipsing dystopia then like becomes a complete reflection (a reflection the ice even, heheheh), a mirror world, that is arranged around the paradoxes of abuse.

something like an apocalypse of the self, in each other, with no way out. that’s what becomes sketched, stitched together by interstitial obsessions and compulsions. there is a streak of deconstruction, maybe, or just plain fatalistic destruction, which contrasts with any novelistic hero. or like, the book completely privileges the protagonist’s view of himself and the world. this view is clearly obsessive, totalitarian, bullshit, and like, just sick.

but at first it isn’t. again, typically in spec-fic, the process of searching-through-reading is seeing how characters react in familiar situations, or in more external works, a whole construction of new, unknown circumstances. ice strives to be unfamiliar, yet it circles around things the reader clearly knows, things we all know but possibly don’t associate with the material.

so that's played with for a bit, and I assumed that maybe the protagonist has good intentions. he could be just pathetic. or he could be going on a journey. this novel teases those possibilities, those types of guys I'm familiar with, and probably arranges them side-by-side so that they can slip into each other. 

it's very tempting to read ice as an allegory. I’m making it sound like an allegory. you know, it probably is an allegory. but it also feels reduced by allegory. ice is vague, but specific. it’s literal about things that tend to go unsaid, or undeveloped normally in language. there’s a naturalism to its conception of violence.

and it slowly peels back that temptation, the narratives that one may tell themselves to inhabit that role without any cognitive dissonance. these blurred categories, and slides into banal evil, feel very personal to me. it feels like the author’s own attempt to understand who would do something like this, and why. kavan writes a convincing confession, with too-sharp closure, resigned, doomed to the narrative patterns being critiqued.

the world here is just fucked. the novel makes you feel unsure of how much, or for how long; it keeps the happenings and circumstances direct, but their mechanisms unknown. these mechanisms never become revealed, though the novel makes their psychological dimensions, their personal definitions, clearer and clearer as it leaps around its own condensed crisis. we’re left with a clear, personal definition of apocalypse.

wasnotwhynot

spec-fic tends to be utopian… if not in whole, then in parts. even in dystopic works, there’s usually some element of resistance, or some presence of the miracle, which lends to the possibility of change, or rupture. the dystopia is a failure of utopia and so it can suggest its opposite, the path that was strayed from. either the possibility, or its negative (from which arises another possibility), permits the tension of loss.

ice is twisty, torturous, unwell. it doesn’t have a present negation. it doesn’t have any other potentials. it explicitly teases possibilities in order to state, explicitly, that they’re impossible. this total eclipsing dystopia then like becomes a complete reflection (a reflection the ice even, heheheh), a mirror world, that is arranged around the paradoxes of abuse.

something like an apocalypse of the self, in each other, with no way out. that’s what becomes sketched, stitched together by interstitial obsessions and compulsions. there is a streak of deconstruction, maybe, or just plain fatalistic destruction, which contrasts with any novelistic hero. or like, the book completely privileges the protagonist’s view of himself and the world. this view is clearly obsessive, totalitarian, bullshit, and like, just sick.

but at first it isn’t. again, typically in spec-fic, the process of searching-through-reading is seeing how characters react in familiar situations, or in more external works, a whole construction of new, unknown circumstances. ice strives to be unfamiliar, yet it circles around things the reader clearly knows, things we all know but possibly don’t associate with the material.

so that's played with for a bit, and I assumed that maybe the protagonist has good intentions. he could be just pathetic. or he could be going on a journey. this novel teases those possibilities, those types of guys I'm familiar with, and probably arranges them side-by-side so that they can slip into each other. 

it's very tempting to read ice as an allegory. I’m making it sound like an allegory. you know, it probably is an allegory. but it also feels reduced by allegory. ice is vague, but specific. it’s literal about things that tend to go unsaid, or undeveloped normally in language. there’s a naturalism to its conception of violence.

and it slowly peels back that temptation, the narratives that one may tell themselves to inhabit that role without any cognitive dissonance. these blurred categories, and slides into banal evil, feel very personal to me. it feels like the author’s own attempt to understand who would do something like this, and why. kavan writes a convincing confession, with too-sharp closure, resigned, doomed to the narrative patterns being critiqued.

the world here is just fucked. the novel makes you feel unsure of how much, or for how long; it keeps the happenings and circumstances direct, but their mechanisms unknown. these mechanisms never become revealed, though the novel makes their psychological dimensions, their personal definitions, clearer and clearer as it leaps around its own condensed crisis. we’re left with a clear, personal definition of apocalypse.

"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"--Amazon.com.

Lindy

Reminded me so much of Kafka's The Castle, yet was less legible to me.

Matthew Royal

A book about an endless frigid journey, read while on a 12-hour flight back home.

Bryan Alexander

Ice is a very strange and impressive novel. It's the first thing I've read by Anna Kavan.

The plot concerns a man desperately trying to find and win a woman, during an apocalypse. The nature of the world's end isn't exactly clear, although it includes sudden and rapid glaciation (hence the title). There are rumors of plagues, wars, political chaos, and more; we never get an objective view, so it's hard to tell.

The protagonist hunts for the heroine across all kinds of landscapes and situations, over multiple continents. And his love is disturbing, often either infantilizing or sadistic. Every time he regains her things go awry each time, with his fumbled communications and her frequent hatred for him. Meanwhile a third party forms a Girardean triangle of desire, the unnamed Warden, a ruthless political leader who also loves and usually wins the heroine. The warden and the narrators are doubles, very similar, and sometimes mistaken for one another.

If the preceding sounds abstract, that's because Ice is very dreamlike and surreal. The protagonist is prone to visions and dreams which spill across his perception of reality. Kavan neatly intertwines these worlds, especially in the first half, giving the novel a disturbing, at times confusing quality. This is beyond the usual unreliable narrator and heads towards classic surrealism. Ultimately this narratives strategy lets us see this book as really being about mental instability or illness.

I am curious about how many readers view(ed) Ice as a romance, given the plot structure and some of the narrator's professions. Because it is equally a novel of predation and gender-based cruelty.

Overall, a strange and fascinating novel.

Leila

gabrielle v

'Few novelists match the intensity of her vision' J. G. Ballard No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the sylph-like, silver-haired girl he loves, as she keeps running - away from her husband; away from the sinister 'warden' who seeks to control her; away from him. 'A raw, brutal tale set in a frozen post-nuclear dystopia ... addictive and extremely entertaining' Guardian 'There is nothing else quite like Ice' Doris Lessing 'She is De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister' Brian Aldiss

Ellisa 🐇

In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man known as "the warden" search for an elusive girl in a frozen, 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 in this hallucinatory quest-novel. Acclaimed by Brian Aldiss on its publication in 1967 as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognized as a major work of literature in its own right.

Jason Lo

A kabel 

gabriel

Josh Waldman

Rob F

Steve Wood

Vladimir

Cat Josephson

Hana 

Sinem Gökmen

Michael Chen

Ezra Alie

No sun, no shadows, no life, a dead cold' No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it. Every day it creeps further across the earth, covering the land in snow and freezing everything in its path. Through this bleached, devastated world, one man pursues the sylph-like, silver-haired girl he loves, as she keeps running - away from her husband; away from the sinister 'warden' who seeks to control her; away from him.

Ice

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