Ice - Anna Kavan, a review

Nightmarish. Ice is a novel saturated with atmosphere and just as thickly cloaked in ambiguity and all the discontinuity you get with the average nightmare, wrought out of the most wonderfully foggy prose and with a constant stream of dread that build and builds throughout the book. The story is essentially about a man who tries to track down a women he apparently (apparently) loves in a world where the apocalypse is coming in the form of ice slowly encroaching the world, killing everything. Reminiscent of the Cryogenian period, and in ways both cosmic in scale and yet fundamentally understandable, Anna Kavan carves such a potent and emotive world with very little direct worldbuilding that it is astounding that the world of Ice is not more talked about when thinking about apocalyptic novels. The book to me most closely resembles the 1986 malayalam film "Amma Ariyan" where a man moves to go to Cochin to inform the mother of a stranger that the stranger has died, moving through a Kerela…