I heard of this book from a friend of mine who is a junior designer in Shanghai. She's the type of person who loves a challenge and so often wounds up doing art work totally unrelated to her job. She has both a passion for movie-making and non-linear narratives and so, when she met a French novelist who works on Kavan at a workshop, they quickly agreed to collaborate. Me being a literature student, she came to me for insight on this author she had never read before. But neither had I. Shamefully, I had never even heard of Kavan. I became interested as soon as I looked her up and bought Ice for starters. It's always wonderful when you find a forgotten gem in your literary wanderings, and Kavan is one of the brightest I've found in a long time. 
 Ice is both without beginning or end, just a piece of a never-ending cycle. It's not exactly a story. It's a fragment of the relation between a man and a woman and how one predates on the other. The man is the subject, the woman is always referred to as "the girl", both providing for an infinite referentiality and her diminishment into a child. This positioning makes the narrative more than in any other book I've read that I can remember. The 'I' is more than normative, it wishes to be excusable in its greatest darkness. There is also a recurrent 'he' who may or not be the same as the 'I' (did I mention? The subject is also a psychopath). Thus, there is a triangle in which 'the girl' happens at the top of the pyramid being both a source of amazement and a sacrificial victim. 
 This is such a weird one. Asides from what I've mentioned, the events take place in an apocalyptic world in which everything is quickly being eaten away by ice, thus creating a sense of impending doom. The whole book is a failed escape, even if camouflaged as hunt, since the narrator is the one stalking the girl. But no matter how far one goes, there comes the ice. There comes the 'I'. 
 And that is never, never good.