«Лед» (1967) — главный роман британской писательницы Анны Каван, которую при жизни сравнивали с Вирджинией Вульф и называли сестрой Кафки. Критики считают Каван основоположницей жанра slipstream («завихрение») — литературы фантазийного воображения, где причинно-следственные связи держатся на волоске, а обостренные до предела чувства несравнимо важнее логики. В ее романах вполне реалистичное изображение вдруг подергивается рябью, и из глубины подсознания всплывают на поверхность неожиданные образы и картины.
A science fiction metaphysical thriller by a writer who has been garnering cult status was chosen by Brian Aldiss as the best science fiction work of 1967.A brilliant and memorable novel, the narrator and a man known as the warden search for an elusive girl in a surreal landscape of ice and snow, the result of a nuclear disaster. The country has been invaded; it is being run by a secret government and is under imminent threat of total nuclear destruction. With the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest through the interminable and encroaching walls of ice.Written while Kavan was addicted to heroin, it was the last of her novels to be published before she died in 1968.
Depicting the hopeless, emotional polarity of a young couple, this novel follows their doomed marriage spent in a remote, tropical hell. She—described only as “the girl”—is young, sophisticated and sensitive. He, “Mr. Dog-Head,” is an unreconstructed thug and heavy drinker who rapes his wife, otherwise passing his time bludgeoning rats with a tennis racket. Together with a visiting stranger, “Suede Boots”—who urges the woman to escape until he is banished by her husband—these characters live through the same situations twice. Their identities are equally real—or unreal—in each case. With slight variation in the background and the novel’s atmosphere, neither the outcome nor the characters themselves are quite the same the second time. The constant question of the jungle “brain-lever” bird remains unanswered: Review
