The Ice Carriers
by Anna Enquist
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"What happens to parents when a teenager runs away from home? The Ice Carriers revolves around the charged relationships between husband and wife, parent and child. Nico and Louise both have successful careers: Nico is a director of a psychiatric hospital,"Tags
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Member Reviews
A dark little story about a middle-class couple living a comfortable life in a coastal town in North Holland, but with a catastrophic gap in their lives where their nineteen-year-old daughter ought to be. Loes is a classics teacher, focussing on the order and structure of Tacitus when she isn't trying to impose order on her sandy garden; her husband Nico is the kind of psychiatrist who believes that the job of his profession is to re-equip people with acute mental illness for ordinary life in the community as quickly and efficiently as possible, and is keen to sweep all the psychoanalysts and long-term clients out of his hospital.
Naturally, poetic justice takes a hand, and he realises that he and Loes are like the ice-carriers they show more heard about on a holiday in France twenty years ago, men who used to bring slowly melting loads of fresh ice down on their backs from Pyrenean glaciers to the towns.
It's difficult to read this without remembering that Enquist is a psychoanalyst in her day job, and that she must have written this around the time that she lost her own grown-up daughter in a road accident. There's a lot of very dark anger here, and not much daylight glimmering through. But the "office politics" of the psychiatric hospital comes over very convincingly. show less
Naturally, poetic justice takes a hand, and he realises that he and Loes are like the ice-carriers they show more heard about on a holiday in France twenty years ago, men who used to bring slowly melting loads of fresh ice down on their backs from Pyrenean glaciers to the towns.
It's difficult to read this without remembering that Enquist is a psychoanalyst in her day job, and that she must have written this around the time that she lost her own grown-up daughter in a road accident. There's a lot of very dark anger here, and not much daylight glimmering through. But the "office politics" of the psychiatric hospital comes over very convincingly. show less
A couple has lost their daughter, and they are beginning to lose one another, and this novel by Anna Enquist is the story of their seemingly, terribly normal lives and concerns becoming... something else.
Brilliantly written, and with a lyricism that makes one feel as if they're reading a narration of lives being lived rather than written, this is one of those books that is difficult to put aside. Short as it is, there's power in every page and every moment, and the calmness flowing through the language makes the actions and the emotions behind the characters all the more terrible, and all the more real.
For readers of literary fiction, or who read that first sentence of this review and are curious, I have to say: pick this up. I'm so show more glad to have discovered Enquist's writing, and this book won't be something I'll easily forget.
So, yes, I recommend it. show less
Brilliantly written, and with a lyricism that makes one feel as if they're reading a narration of lives being lived rather than written, this is one of those books that is difficult to put aside. Short as it is, there's power in every page and every moment, and the calmness flowing through the language makes the actions and the emotions behind the characters all the more terrible, and all the more real.
For readers of literary fiction, or who read that first sentence of this review and are curious, I have to say: pick this up. I'm so show more glad to have discovered Enquist's writing, and this book won't be something I'll easily forget.
So, yes, I recommend it. show less
Aansprekende novelle. Delicate en tegelijkertijd snoeiharde analyse van een relatie in verval.
Apr 10, 2014Dutch
1
kort maar heftig verhaal
Apr 17, 2008Dutch
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55+ Works 2,891 Members
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Has as a student's study guide
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Ice Carriers
- Original title
- De ijsdragers
- Original publication date
- 2002
- Dedication*
- Ik draag dit boek op aan mijn dochter
Margit
die mij met haar literaire kennis en haar grote gevoelsbegaafdheid hielp het te voltooien. - First words*
- Zandgrond had ze altijd gehaat hoewel veel mensen er hoog van op gaven.
- Last words*
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Ze maakte zich los van de omstanders, deed een stap naar voren en liet het zand met een doffe plof op de kist vallen.
- Original language*
- Nederlands
- Disambiguation notice
- Dit is de uitgebreide editie uit 2003 van het oorspronkelijke boekenweekgeschenk uit 2002 en telt ongeveer 40 extra pagina's. Svp niet combineren met het boekenweekgeschenk.
This is the expanded 2003 edition (some 40 p... (show all)ages were added). Please do not combine with the original Boekenweek-edition from 2002.
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- General Fiction, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 839.31 — Literature & rhetoric German & related literatures Other Germanic literatures Netherlandish literatures Dutch
- LCC
- PT5881.15 .N68 .I37 — Language and Literature German, Dutch and Scandinavian literatures Dutch literature Individual authors or works 1961-2000
Statistics
- Members
- 446
- Popularity
- 68,586
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.23)
- Languages
- 5 — Dutch, English, French, German, Swedish
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 9
