I should have been inured to climatic changes; but I again felt I had moved out of ordinary life into an area of total strangeness. All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.
Why read science fiction? Have you read the news? Forever chemicals in freshwater. Ohio says natural gas is now clean energy. More tornadoes than average nationwide. Less snow than average in Chicago.
I could have written this post ten years ago and there would be equally as bizarre environmental concerns.
Is that what makes Ice such a good book? The confusing narrative, the hallucinations, the not knowing what is and is not real? We’re apparently hurtling towards disaster, but we still dance and party like nothing is going to happen.
I was aware of an uncertainty of the real, in my surroundings and in myself. What I saw had no solidity, it was all made of mist and nylon, with nothing behind.
Some lemurs do actually sing. Although these kind of sound like my cat. This might also be the only book I’ve read and enjoyed to feature dragons.
But it’s not all singing lemurs and dragons. Leaders abandoning the people they are supposed to lead. Explosions destroying a room that no one seems to pay attention to. Creeping death.
I think of books that would not exist without this book: White Noise. The Road. Severance.
Kavan is compared to Jean Rhys in Kate Zambreno’s afterword. I think of Sarah Kane too. Maybe it’s because of K names. Maybe it’s because the trauma in their real lives that was reflected in their fictive works. Maybe it’s the surreality of everything. Maybe it’s the violence. Maybe it’s despite it all:
I could not remain isolated from the rest of the world…
While at the same time:
An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt. I was profoundly depressed, left with a sense of waiting for something frightful to happen, a sort of mass execution.
And further:
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.
///
…but I again felt I had moved out of ordinary life into an area of total strangeness. All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.
I read this book right before I had Covid for two weeks. It snowed that week but I was living in a world of heat. I had a fever that lasted over three days. I couldn’t sleep more than an hour at a time. I felt like I had drank a fifth of Jack Daniels and smoked half a pack of Marlboro Reds - my head hammered and my throat burned. Terrible congestion. The chills. I never lost my sense of smell or taste thankfully, and my breathing has been OK. Although I could feel sharp pain around my heart, like the virus was making a tight fist around each atrium and ventricle.
A week after finally testing negative, I feel mostly back to normal.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
While sick with Covid, I watched a documentary about Kurt Vonnegut. It didn’t mention the above quote, but I always think of Vonnegut’s writing advice. How characters should want something. Kavan wrote a whole book about wanting, about searching.
How to write when everything I want feels out of step with the world? Does anyone out there want what I want?
In the time since I wrote the first paragraph of this, more news is happening. The Chinese spy balloon. The earthquake in Turkey and Syria has killed over 11,000 people (and counting), towns in Ohio have been evacuated after a train collision releasing toxic chemicals into the air (yes, just like in White Noise), and Mount Washington in New Hampshire hit -108 degrees, the coldest temperature recorded in the continental US.
All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.