April Reading Group Selection: Ice by Anna Kavan

The Book Beat reading group selection for April is Ice by Anna Kavan, with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem and an afterword by Kate Zambreno. This will be a virtual Zoom meeting scheduled for Wednesday, April 27th at 7 PM. Books are available in the store now and are discounted 15%. If you would like to attend, and are not on our reading group list, please RSVP to us with your name, phone number and email and we will add you to our reading group list. Reminders and login links are sent on the morning or day of the meeting. Please check your email and try to login 5-10 minutes before the meeting so we can begin on time. 

In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive ‘glass girl’ with silver hair… A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, and a brilliant allegory for its author’s struggles with addiction—all crystalized in prose glittering as the piling snow.”

“I was aware of an uncertainty of the real, in my surroundings and in myself. What I saw had no solidity, it was all made of mist and nylon, with nothing behind.” –Anna Kavan, Ice

“There is nothing else like it… She is one of the most distinctive twentieth-century novelists.” – Doris Lessing, Nobel Laureate

“Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision.” -J. G. Ballard, author of Crash and Empire of the Sun

“The culmination of an artistic trajectory that took her from conventional realism into something strange and difficult to categorize… A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real.” – Jon Michaud, The New Yorker

“Ice is a book like the moon is the moon. There is only one. It’s cold and white, and it stares back, both defiant and impassive, static and frantically on the move, marked by phases, out of reach. It may even seem to be following you.” – Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times

“What a writer, and what a vision. What a perfect book to read in preparation for the end of the world.” – Eli Goldstone, Granta

Anna Kavan (1901–1968) was born Helen Woods to wealthy British parents in Cannes. The family moved often between Europe and the United States and, when she was ten, Kavan was sent to boarding school in the United Kingdom. The following year her father committed suicide. In 1920, Kavan married a railway engineer and the two moved to Burma, where their son, Bryan, was born. The couple separated in 1925, and she returned to London to attend art school and begin using heroin. In 1928 she married the artist Stuart Edmonds, and the next year published her first novel, A Charmed Circle. While married to Edmonds, she published six books as Helen Ferguson, and in 1935 they had a daughter, Margaret, who died shortly after birth. They soon adopted a daughter, Susanna. In 1938, as the marriage deteriorated, Kavan attempted suicide and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland. Adopting the name Anna Kavan (after a character who had appeared in two of her earlier books), she would write about this experience in the short-story collection Asylum Piece (1940), which was met with acclaim. She would go on to write criticism, journalism, dozens of stories, and several novels as Kavan, including her most successful book, the novel Ice (1967), which was published the year before she died of heart failure. Aware of the influence her lifestory would have on future readings of her work, she sytematically destroyed personal correspondence and her own diaries.