This is a truly bizarre and wonderful novel. This would also make a difficult and beautiful and amazing movie I think.
What is this? Imagine if Virginia Woolf wrote Sliders.
Well more so imagine if Virginia Woolf wrote Chris Marker’s Le Jetee.
So this book follows a male narrator pursuing a young woman who envisions in a barren landscape of snow and ice through a kind of time travel/alternate universe slip stream. Each chapter opens with the briefest of descriptions of his journey, of his current situation and setting, and then floats forward. It’s like awakening 15 or 20 times into a new reality and a new context and moving forward without question and with a vaguely defined purpose.
Each chapter then has a kind of milky set of plot points or little moments of story as our narrator finds himself facing a new conflict in this bizarre world. The writing is lucid and direct, even if the concepts its describing are not.
This novel feels absolutely revelatory and also seems to have come completely out of nowhere. It was published in the early 1960s and definitely feels like a science fiction novel, and shares of lot of these qualities. But it also clearly does not feel like a 1960s science fiction novel. All I can tell you is that you should consider reading it. It goes pretty quickly and is short and has a dreamy quality. I read it in an airport terminal waiting for a plane, and the weirdness of that experience, or at least the placelessness of that experience helped really capture the novel for me.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Ice-Peter-Owen-Cased-Classics/dp/0720620058/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1FDARWFM3D067&keywords=ice+anna+kavan&qid=1554649179&s=gateway&sprefix=ice+anna+%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-1)