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"It is a deeply unsettling and eerie book – with its blend of clarity and catastrophe, ice and irrationality."
– Politiken
“"It is masterful, feminist eco-criticism, and it is wonderful that this shattering novel is now available in Danish.
Also, praise to illustrator Uncle Hawaii, who has given the publication a beautifully dark aesthetic in ice blue, petroleum, and dusty deep carnation red."”
– Weekendavisen
"An action-packed death drive toward the end of the world. It is unsettling on countless levels and contains striking moments of bizarre poetry. This book can mess with your head like no other novel."
– Vagant
“… a dream play … However we choose to classify the book, there is nothing else like it.”
– Doris Lessing
“… a book that hides, that glimmers, like ‘the girl’ at the center of its stark, fable-like tableau of disasters, persecution, and compulsive repetition. … Though *Ice* is always luminous and easily comprehensible, nothing within it is simple, as it concentrates the qualities of both the labyrinth and the mirror.”
– Jonathan Lethem
"Anna Kavan's novel from the 1960s about misogyny and climate change possesses an almost prophetic dimension."
– Ida Théren, Svenska Dagbladet
Day by day, hour by hour, second by second, walls of ice advance from the North and South Poles. Cities are abandoned, waves of refugees are driven back and forth, civilians are massacred, and nuclear missiles are deployed. War rages everywhere, and no one knows who is friend or foe as nature and civilization collapse around them.
And amid this collapse unfolds an intense love triangle between the narrator, the young woman, and the tyrannical Commander, who sadistically torments the woman—who, more or less willingly, submits in one hallucinatory tableau after another.
" ICE" is considered a modern British classic and a key work in an authorship that was once known only to the initiated but is now undergoing extensive rediscovery and reevaluation. In Denmark, authors such as Olga Ravn, Harald Voetmann, and Fine Gråbøl are fans; internationally, figures like Patti Smith, Anaïs Nin, Deborah Levy, and J.G. Ballard have expressed their admiration over the years. With its focus on opioid addiction, psychopathology, female oppression, and violent sexuality, Kavan may have been ahead of her time—and perhaps for that very reason, she feels strangely contemporary today.
The novel has been interpreted as feminist, eco-critical, and post-apocalyptic science fiction, a disaster novel, *roman nouveau*, Cold War thriller, and even as an allegory of the author's own heroin addiction. But above all, it is profoundly unstable—layering unreality upon unreality, constructing a dreamlike and dystopian universe.
“I was lost, and it was already getting dark. I had been driving for hours and was nearly out of gas. The thought of being stranded in the darkness in these desolate mountain regions made me uneasy, so I was relieved to see a road sign and an exit leading to a gas station.
As I rolled down the window to speak with the attendant, I had to turn up my collar against the cold. He chatted about the weather as he filled the car’s tank.
"It has never been this cold at this time of year before. The weather forecast says everything is freezing over."
"Most of my life had been spent abroad, either as a soldier or a globetrotter in distant lands. But even though I had recently returned from the tropics and the harsh frost didn’t bother me much, I was struck by the ominous tone in his words.
Eager to move on, I asked for directions to the small town I was looking for."
"You'll never find it in this darkness. It's quite remote, and the mountain roads are deadly when iced over."”
Anna Kavan (1901-1968), born Helen Emily Woods, grew up as an only child in a wealthy British family that frequently traveled between
Europe, England, and the USA. She debuted as a writer in 1929 and wrote a number of novels under her married name, Helen Ferguson. However, after a stay at a sanatorium in Switzerland just before World War II, she reinvented herself as the platinum blonde Anna Kavan, named after a character in one of her early novels. *Ice* was published in 1967 and is considered Kavan's magnum opus. She died of a heart attack the following year.
Published in collaboration with FORLAGET SIDSTE ÅRHUNDREDE.
Illustrations by Uncle Hawaii
