Anna Kavan (1901–1968)
Author of Ice
About the Author
Works by Anna Kavan
Julia and the Bazooka [short story] 2 copies
The Dark Sisters 2 copies
The Visitor 1 copy
Loretta Young The Things I Had to Learn as told to Helen Ferguson, The Warm, Honest, Human Revelations of a Star (1961) 1 copy
Goose Cross 1 copy
Associated Works
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss (2000) — Contributor — 228 copies, 2 reviews
Little Reviews Anthology 1945 — Contributor, some editions — 2 copies
Meesters der vertelkunst : zevenendertig verhalen uit de moderne wereldliteratuur (1975) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Kavan, Anna
- Legal name
- Woods, Helen Emily (born)
Ferguson, Helen (married)
Edmonds, Helen (married) - Other names
- Kavan, Anna
Ferguson, Helen - Birthdate
- 1901-04-10
- Date of death
- 1968-12-05
- Gender
- female
- Education
- London Central School of Arts and Crafts
Parsons Mead School, Ashstead, England, UK
Malvern College, Malvern, Worcestershire, England, UK - Occupations
- novelist
short story writer
painter - Relationships
- Bluth, Karl Theodor (friend, collaborator)
Davies, Rhys (friend) - Short biography
- Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods in Cannes, France to wealthy British parents. She spent her childhood in Europe, the UK, and the USA. At age 17, she married Donald Ferguson, with whom she had a son, and accompanied him for his work to Burma, where she began writing. Her early works were published under her first married name, Helen Ferguson. She remarried in 1931 to Stuart Edmonds, an artist, and lived in England, Europe, the USA, Australia, and New Zealand before settling in London. She became a heroin addict and used amphetamines, spent two long periods in mental hospitals, and attempted suicide at least three times. In 1939, she moved to New York and legally changed her name to Anna Kavan, taken from a character in her novels Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1935). She became an acclaimed writer and painter and a successful interior decorator. During the early part of World War II, she worked for a military psychiatric unit, and after returning to England in 1943, she was an editorial assistant for Horizon, which published some of her short stories and book reviews. She also worked as an assistant to the magazine's editor, Cyril Connolly. In 1950, she established the architecture and design firm Kavan Properties, and during the 1960s, bought and renovated old houses in London. Anaïs Nin, in her poetic literary study The Novel of the Future (1968), praised Anna Kavan for her "nocturnal writing" alongside Djuna Barnes, John Hawkes, and others. The novel Ice (1967) is generally considered Kavan's masterpiece. Several volumes of her work were published posthumously. Anna Kavan's friend, writer Rhys Davies, based his novel The Honeysuckle Girl (1975) on her early life.
- Cause of death
- heart failure
- Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Cannes, France
- Places of residence
- Cannes, Alpes-Maritimes, France
London, England
Napier, New Zealand
Burma - Place of death
- London, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Reviews
I didn't know anything about [Ice] before opening its cover and diving it. It is surreal - like an arctic fever dream and yet also has a sort of spy story feel to it. The writing style reminded me of Italo Calvino's [Invisible Cities]. The storyline seems to weave back upon itself, and the same scenario keeps repeating but with differing evolutions. The world is a dystopian one where ice is slowly encasing the planet, and I did love the numerous different ways that Kavan describes the all show more encompassing cold. But the cold also permeates her characters - I didn't like anyone in this novel, and didn't much enjoy the story, but I kept reading because I wanted to know where it was going. And just when I got to the final pages, and I thought I knew where she was going with it all, and I thought it was brilliant...she didn't go there. So disappointing. And slightly maddening.
Originally published in 1967, Kavan's vision of climate change will speak to present day readers. show less
"Instead of my world, there would soon be only ice, snow, stillness, death; no more violence, no war, no victims; nothing but frozen silence, absence of life. The ultimate achievement of mankind would be, not just self-destruction, but the destruction of all life; the transformation of the living world into a dead planet."
Originally published in 1967, Kavan's vision of climate change will speak to present day readers. show less
Ice by Anna Kavan
Other than that time I had open heart surgery in the next-to-last year of the Twentieth Century and, afterwards, in my recovery, was prescribed powerful opioids to manage the impossible throbbing pain from the incision, reading Ice by Anna Kavan is the closest I've ever come to being a junkie. Classic though it is, Junky's got nothing on Ice when it comes to having a vicarious experience of what the long term hallucinatory effects of using heroin must be like upon one's psyche. Sorry, show more William S. B., you know I still love you.
Ice is a consummate downer. It is major clinical depression — and maybe madness — incarnate, a deep freeze of the mind and spirit that is somehow resurrected as a phoenix ablaze in the preternatural imagination of Anna Kavan, who projects her cold conflagration out into the (un)natural world. Ice burns its images, it's searing insanity, into the deepest crevices of your mind — a dry ice novel if there ever was one, as smoke and snowflakes waft a-spiraling from its peculiar pages. But it is a beautiful, brittle, burning world, imagined by Anna Kavan; her physical and psychological chaotic cosmos, an optical illusion, ruined by cold explosions of luminous, fiery ice. My God there are so many different ways you could interpret the unnamed narrator's stark perceptions of her inner and outer worlds. She defines it for us in a line: "Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me". I can't help wondering, hearing her take on "reality," if perhaps the "she" narrating the grim journey has dissociated, and the woman she meets early on in the novel at the "fort on the hill" is really a projection of herself rather than a separate individual? In other words, the unnamed "Her" she seeks in the novel could be a simple, but complex (and I suspect ultimately hopeless) search for herself, perhaps? Maybe. Maybe not. Ambiguity reigns in Ice. Interpretations are open-ended. Reality and delusion are so well blended they've become something else entirely, but what? A "hybrid state of being," as an online friend — Zenomax — who was also reading the book at the same time I was, coined it, with an ability to see what most of us cannot — a lucid delusion perhaps?
"Ice had already engulfed the forest, the last ranks of trees were splintering. Her silver hair touched my mouth, she was leaning against me. Then I lost her; my hands could not find her again. A snapped-off tree trunk was dancing high in the sky, hurled up hundreds of feet by the impact of the ice. There was a flash, everything was shaken. My suitcase was lying open, half-packed, on the bed. The windows of my room were still wide open, the curtains streamed into the room. Outside the treetops were streaming. . . ."
What do you make of that? Her voice, the narrator's of Ice, estranged from any recognizable reality I've ever seen, is reminiscent to me of many of the unhinged, anxiety ridden, narrators in Asylum Piece and Other Stories, who weren't so much "mad" I think, as they were erroneously and so often maliciously diagnosed by their "caretakers" or wardens, but more likely lacking the psychological defense mechanisms that protect most "sane" persons from the intensity of their feelings and perceptions over the losses, the griefs, the addictions, and the resultant isolation that are somehow triggered and later magnified whenever they are exposed for any length of time to the simple rawness of the images and sensations produced by the outer "natural" world confining them inside a subzero and cavernous spiritual claustrophobia. A world of mental suffocation, whiteouts, disorientation, "diminishing visibility ... increasing uneasiness" creating such acute panic and paranoia that delusion and hallucinations become the understandably "sanest" refuges for this unreliable narrator in an, if we're to believe her perceptions, incomprehensible, nuclear ruined icescape.
Ice, in a sentence, is a frigid death sentence; it is an abstractionist's vision of a personal post-apocalypse. Ice was Anna Kavan's last fix, a sumptuous suicide note, her frost bitten goodbye.
"...she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vi-brating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its in-habitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour."
Poetic, alliterative passages like the one above, remind me of William Blake. Or is it Samuel Taylor Coleridge's frozen abyss in Kublai Khan I'm reminded of — or maybe both? Some online friends hereabouts have astutely suggested that Ice reminds them of the late reclusive French author, Julien Gracq. Indeed, Ice could be Chateau d'Argol set in Antarctica. show less
Ice is a consummate downer. It is major clinical depression — and maybe madness — incarnate, a deep freeze of the mind and spirit that is somehow resurrected as a phoenix ablaze in the preternatural imagination of Anna Kavan, who projects her cold conflagration out into the (un)natural world. Ice burns its images, it's searing insanity, into the deepest crevices of your mind — a dry ice novel if there ever was one, as smoke and snowflakes waft a-spiraling from its peculiar pages. But it is a beautiful, brittle, burning world, imagined by Anna Kavan; her physical and psychological chaotic cosmos, an optical illusion, ruined by cold explosions of luminous, fiery ice. My God there are so many different ways you could interpret the unnamed narrator's stark perceptions of her inner and outer worlds. She defines it for us in a line: "Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me". I can't help wondering, hearing her take on "reality," if perhaps the "she" narrating the grim journey has dissociated, and the woman she meets early on in the novel at the "fort on the hill" is really a projection of herself rather than a separate individual? In other words, the unnamed "Her" she seeks in the novel could be a simple, but complex (and I suspect ultimately hopeless) search for herself, perhaps? Maybe. Maybe not. Ambiguity reigns in Ice. Interpretations are open-ended. Reality and delusion are so well blended they've become something else entirely, but what? A "hybrid state of being," as an online friend — Zenomax — who was also reading the book at the same time I was, coined it, with an ability to see what most of us cannot — a lucid delusion perhaps?
"Ice had already engulfed the forest, the last ranks of trees were splintering. Her silver hair touched my mouth, she was leaning against me. Then I lost her; my hands could not find her again. A snapped-off tree trunk was dancing high in the sky, hurled up hundreds of feet by the impact of the ice. There was a flash, everything was shaken. My suitcase was lying open, half-packed, on the bed. The windows of my room were still wide open, the curtains streamed into the room. Outside the treetops were streaming. . . ."
What do you make of that? Her voice, the narrator's of Ice, estranged from any recognizable reality I've ever seen, is reminiscent to me of many of the unhinged, anxiety ridden, narrators in Asylum Piece and Other Stories, who weren't so much "mad" I think, as they were erroneously and so often maliciously diagnosed by their "caretakers" or wardens, but more likely lacking the psychological defense mechanisms that protect most "sane" persons from the intensity of their feelings and perceptions over the losses, the griefs, the addictions, and the resultant isolation that are somehow triggered and later magnified whenever they are exposed for any length of time to the simple rawness of the images and sensations produced by the outer "natural" world confining them inside a subzero and cavernous spiritual claustrophobia. A world of mental suffocation, whiteouts, disorientation, "diminishing visibility ... increasing uneasiness" creating such acute panic and paranoia that delusion and hallucinations become the understandably "sanest" refuges for this unreliable narrator in an, if we're to believe her perceptions, incomprehensible, nuclear ruined icescape.
Ice, in a sentence, is a frigid death sentence; it is an abstractionist's vision of a personal post-apocalypse. Ice was Anna Kavan's last fix, a sumptuous suicide note, her frost bitten goodbye.
"...she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vi-brating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its in-habitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour."
Poetic, alliterative passages like the one above, remind me of William Blake. Or is it Samuel Taylor Coleridge's frozen abyss in Kublai Khan I'm reminded of — or maybe both? Some online friends hereabouts have astutely suggested that Ice reminds them of the late reclusive French author, Julien Gracq. Indeed, Ice could be Chateau d'Argol set in Antarctica. show less
Ice by Anna Kavan
I went into this blind, and the summary is the most misleading thing I've ever read.
Written in first person POV, with an unreliable narrator who is possibly a split personality, and his possible other self is also his biggest rival and her abuser. The object of his obsession is a woman who is constantly being described as a victimized child and inevitably makes you put the narrator in the role of an abuser (split personality or not), thought he views himself as her savior. It's not clear show more whether the narrator is telling his point of view chronologically.
I hated every minute of this book, possibly because I was blindsided by the blurb. Every page was read with this buzzing feeling of anxiety and dread. show less
I hated every minute of this book, possibly because I was blindsided by the blurb. Every page was read with this buzzing feeling of anxiety and dread. show less
Ice by Anna Kavan
I fully expected to love this book, but it actually left me rather cold (sorry 😔). The main character is a narcissistic abuser who repeatedly terrorises the woman who is the object of his obsession, vindictively punishing her when she has the temerity to object.
Yes, it is surreal and has a kaleidoscopically shifting viewpoint in which the characters may actually be aspects of the same fractured personality, but I found it hard to get past the ugliness of the central theme of abusive show more persecution. Perhaps that was Kavan's intent, to depict the brutality and sterility of abusive relationships. Actually, reflecting on that I'd shift it from 3 to 3.5⭐, but I don't think I'll be wanting to re-read it. show less
Yes, it is surreal and has a kaleidoscopically shifting viewpoint in which the characters may actually be aspects of the same fractured personality, but I found it hard to get past the ugliness of the central theme of abusive show more persecution. Perhaps that was Kavan's intent, to depict the brutality and sterility of abusive relationships. Actually, reflecting on that I'd shift it from 3 to 3.5⭐, but I don't think I'll be wanting to re-read it. show less
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