A review by roach
Ice by Anna Kavan

adventurous dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

The snow thickened, inexhaustibly falling, incessantly sifting down, spreading a sheet of sterile whiteness over the face of the dying world, burying the violent and their victims together in a mass grave, obliterating the last trace of man and his works.

I didn't know anything about Anna Kavan before reading this and so I went into this mostly expecting something of an icy adventure with some apocalypse elements of an impending ice age. What I didn't know is how heavy it would be on the themes of abuse and trauma, which made sense the more I read about the author.

It ironically took a bit for me to get warm with Kavan's Ice. The dreamlike narration full of tangential interruptions took some getting used to but once I realized what it was trying to achieve, I was more able to follow the text like it was a dream itself that flows from one state into another without any questioning of itself. Fitting of a text with a protagonist whose delusions become clearer with time.
The plot also took a while for me to make much sense. What starts as the enigmatic search for a woman by the seemingly well-intentioned protagonist eventually becomes more questionable as time goes on and occasional flashes of hateful desires or imaginations pop up until the character eventually fully reveals himself in the end as despicable as the actual antagonist of the story. 
I'm very unsure if what I'm taking away from this book is what was intended by the author, but the story read to me as being about how the entitlement to be the savior of someone else can become abuse by taking away that person's own agency to live their own life. The more the protagonist felt like the nameless woman needed his help to survive and be safe, the less that woman thrived which in turn fed his blind rage. The victim becomes the victim by having that role pushed on her by people that are convinced she needs protection and don't realize their forceful imposition and pitying is actually what enables the misery.

It's an interesting perspective on abusive relationships and how they can be caught in a perpetual spiral. The text builds all of that up with quite a lot of fantastical atmosphere as well. The description of the freezing-over landscapes is amazing. Lots of great language about the ice and snow. The glaciers and frost. The cold comes across the page very, very well and matches the cold subject matter.
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