Paperback, 208 pages
Published Nov. 14, 2017 by Penguin Classics.
Anna Kavan's books have established her reputation as one of the most talented and original contemporary writers - comparable in stature to Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes.
A man's search for an elusive girl takes place against a backdrop of nuclear war resulting in total destruction by walls of ice that overrun the world. Imaginative descriptions of a terrifying dreamlike hunt combine with writing of distinction to form an unusual book. (From the book jacket, first british edition published in 1967).
This book is about the main character, a woman, constantly referred to as "the girl" and a third person, "the warden". We don't learn their names. It is not a heartwarming story, but very captivating, about life in a world at war, altered by climate change entering an ice age. There are some hints in the book that it could be some kind of nuclear winter.
The story is unsettling, sometimes hallucinogenic, weird. And a total must-read !
I recognize this book’s literary significance (and there are plenty of 5-star reviews you can read that go deep into the subtext and allegory), and it’s certainly inventive and surreal, but I found it a painful slog to read through, even though it’s less than 200 pages.
A dull, repetitive (oh, do tell me again about the "girl's" hair, her wrists, and the lining of her coat(!)), misogynistic, macho-bullshit-filled book.
A book about an endless frigid journey, read while on a 12-hour flight back home.
This was a difficult book to read and stay focused on. It was very dreamlike and surreal. The book had you frequently questioning what was going on, whose point of view you were seeing things from, what was real, what imagined? Were there two men obsessed with the girl or just two different aspects of the same man? Was the girl's indifference and sometimes outright hatred and coldness to the man, the ice itself? So many questions, so little answered!
Good at setting a mood of paranoia and struggle, of reality vs delusion, of obsessive thoughts driven by compulsion. Sudden changes of scene, of the perception of the main character were disorienting and confusing. Nightmare landscapes, threatening shadowy others always lurking, gave a very convincing feeling of psychosis, lol. Kind of weak on plot though.
