Rare on the Market
KAVAN, Anna. Ice. New York: Doubleday & Company. 1970.
8vo. Original blue cloth boards, spine lettered and blocked in white; pictorial dust jacket; pp. xvi, 176; minimal bruising to spine ends; minor shelf-wear to extremities; slight foxing to fore edge; otherwise near fine.
First US edition, first printing of Anna Kavan's final novel and cult masterpiece. Very rare on the Market.
"Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me…"
After being discharged from an asylum, Helen Ferguson legally borrowed the identity of a fictional protagonist: Anna Kavan, the name that had appeared in her 1940 collection of short stories Asylum Pieces, going so far as to become her own brainchild.
Under the guise of a new authorial persona, Kavan found later mainstream success with Ice, which won the science fiction book of the year after being nominated by Brian Aldiss, who wrote the introduction to this first US edition. Still, he was reluctant to christen a novel written by "'Kafka's sister'" so categorically. Lawrence Durrell would write of Anna Kavan, "I have always thought of her as belonging to the great subjective-feminine tradition- Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Anais Nin", the latter of whom established correspondence with Kavan.
An ice shelf, induced by an abstract nuclear war, is smothering the world; an unnerving play on the effects of the Cold War and a novel she herself classified as a "present day fable". As the unnamed protagonist inexplicably and obsessively pursues his "ice maiden", who herself is seized and controlled by a merciless military husband,"the warden", their ambiguous geography is brutally policed. Kavan's world is strikingly anonymous and as the narrator delves deeper into hallucination, the reader is left without a body to trust in this apocolyptic climate disaster swayed by delusion.
Anna Kavan wrote under the effects of a violent heroin dependency that would cost her life, Just as the myth of Anna Kavan has somewhat usurped record of her living person; her fantastical dystopia, her bold use of non-linear narrative and disruption, has become an everlasting impression of who she was and the ways in which she escaped the depths of her mind through language. As Rhys Davis would write, "Her best stories are representative not only of her art but of her life. She is ‘in’ each".
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