Ice

I thought Kavan was too explicit in how she deals with the themes: "In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind." or "Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me." There's over a dozen of sentences like this in about 150 pages. While lots remains elusive in this book - including definitive interpretation, it paradoxically also spoonfeeds the reader the entire time.

Not that this short novel is not rich thematically - victimhood, addiction, Cold War nuclear angst, abusive relationships, abusive parenting, psychiatry, trauma - but those themes can't really fight their way out of the explicitly surreal frame, except maybe when the surreal is taken as a metaphor for mental instability - in which case that one theme dominates all the others, as the surreal form of this book overshadows all else. On top of that, these themes aren't really explored in depth, and there's heaps of repetition.

Because of a vague subplot concerning some kind of military bureaucracy, I've read comparisons to Kafka, but that doesn't hold true for me. Kafka managed to nearly always instill a sense of urgency in this work, while Kavan can't keep the random parts in check: the fact that everything is possible results in a feeling that nothing really matters, except for the instability itself. Kafka also keeps motivations & human reactions realistic, while in this book political operators act as children and the schizoid takes center stage.

There's some truly great prose here and there, and a few great, harrowing scenes, but again, the good is flanked by too many & too explicit mentions of the "derealized" setting, "chaos" and "contradiction". We get it already.

Obviously, at face value, if taken solely as what it might wanted to be - a representation of mental instability & obsession - the novel is a clear success.

So: 100% a matter of taste - I'm not really a mood/fever dream reader: I didn't like Vandermeer's Annihilation either.

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