Over the course of the episode, we discuss the extent to which Kavan's heroin addiction influenced the novel, consider the novels place in the tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction, and explore the unique brutality of the novel's narrator. The novel proceeds with the torturous, cyclical quality of an inescapable nightmare in which the reader is cocooned. A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real. Our unnamed narrator roams through this barren, frozen wasteland in pursuit of a young girl with a halo of hair as bright as spun glass his designs on her are decidedly sinister. A dazzling and haunting vision of the end of the world, Ice is a masterpiece of literary science fiction now in a new 50th anniversary edition with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem 'One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, society is rapidly crumbling as a wall of ice threatens to engulf the entire planet. The book is Kavan’s final and best known work, and appeared just one year before her death. During a scene in which the film’s unnamed narrator wanders into the childhood bedroom of her boyfriend Jake, the camera briefly shows a copy of Anna Kavan’s hallucinatory novel Ice. Anna Kavan’s Ice was originally published in 1967 by Peter Owen books.
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