Over the course of the novel’s spiraling structure, the two men begin to merge, phasing in and out of one another. In this world, where everything is “misty and indistinct,” there is a love triangle of sorts between these two nameless characters and a third character, also never given a proper name - a tyrannical warden who tortures the girl of the narrator’s obsessions. Ice tells the story - though “story” may not be the best word - of an unnamed narrator on an obsessive quest for a “glass girl” through a frozen landscape, amid a vague, imminent global catastrophe. It is a work of “world-blocking” rather than conventional “world-building.” The world Kavan builds is less a realistic 3-D model of a universe than what might be called “a field of strangeness,” walled off not merely by the ice of the title, but by the concealment (and revelation, always the dance between the two) of the author. It’s cold and white, and it stares back, both defiant and impassive, static and frantically on the move, marked by phases, out of reach.” He could have added that, like the moon, the book seems made of Swiss cheese - full of holes, gaps, fissures. “ANNA KAVAN’S Ice is a book like the moon is the moon,” writes Jonathan Lethem in his foreword to the 50th-anniversary Penguin Classics edition of this underrated masterpiece.
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