Ice by Anna Kavan
Nabokov meets Ballard meets Virginia Woolf. It’s an apocalypse novel written in a high modern fugue with a deranged unreliable narrator. doggedly pursues his beloved, a fragile ice maiden in the clutches of a blue-eyed ogre, across a world collapsing from a climate crisis. Except the narrative completely unexpectedly shifts locations and time periods and even modes and genres in the middle of the chapter, even in the middle of a sentence, so the protagonist will be driving to visit his ex and her imperious new husband at their seaside resort (while the radio ominously warns of an advancing ice shelf) but when he arrives he’s a bard on horseback at a Viking longhouse and their chieftain wants to sacrifice her to a dragon.
It is apparent that the poor woman does not want to be rescued, is terrified of the protagonist and despises him due to some unspecified former history. The ice woman, always demeaningly referred to as "the girl", is an object of obsession and never treated as an equal between the narrator and his antagonist, as though she were just an auxiliary in their little game. To be honest it’s not even clear that the narrator and his antagonist are separate people at all.
I’ve never read anything like it. Is it stream of consciousness science fiction? Ulysses meets Snowpiercer? Or is it the masturbatory fantasy of a jilted lover? The hallucinations of a paranoiac? The delusions of an abusive stalker? A climate change warning? Is the girl simply heroin? Many reviewers can't separate the narrative with Kavan's own dramatic history as an addict, it's not a relevant metaphor for me.
