Ice stays firmly, frustratingly, in the realm of unreal: characters remain nameless and faceless and are developed more as ideas than they are as people. Countries are fractured and factions have emerged, but all eyes are fearfully set towards the stormy horizons and what hardship they may bring. Kavan’s world is ecologically broken, and the incoming weather might lead to a global disaster far greater than whatever political turmoil has afflicted the continents. Outside, snow and ice aggressively bluster. The girl repeatedly evades the narrator, and just when his clues seem to run dry he mysteriously picks up a new trace and starts again. “When I considered that imperative need I felt for her,” the man reflects, “as for a missing part of myself, it appeared less like love than an inexplicable aberration, the sign of some character flaw I ought to eradicate, instead of letting it dominate me.” The narrator tails her like a private investigator and follows strange leads that connect her with a villainous man known as The Warden. A nameless protagonist is repeatedly afflicted with an irrational passion to find a girl from his past: she’s a young, Nordic sort of beauty, a wintry “glass girl” of innocence and purity that is perpetually in need of rescue. Originally published fifty years ago and recently reissued in an anniversary edition with supplemental texts by Jonathan Lethem and Kate Zambreno, Anna Kavan’s Ice is a story of a man obsessed.
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