JOST A MON

One needs a break from obsession once in a while, and I thought I might read a bit of sci-fi to clear my mind of the seriousness of Arabic and other translated fiction. My attention was grabbed by the pulpy cover of Sarah A. Hoyt's Darkship Thieves, and I picked it up, expecting some golden-age-of-science-fiction sort of space opera. It started fairly promisingly - a young woman finds herself attacked by her father's guards. She escapes in a pod and from then on, it's all downhill - she encounters a total he-man, the kind who is surly and has a miserable past and is incredibly fascinating and whom she intensely dislikes at first, and - well, you get the drift. The book rapidly becomes a pulpy Mills-and-Boon-set-in-space. Athena Hera Sinistra could have been a proper female superhero - she is blazingly fast, a superb mechanic, she will not be patronised, she has a sense of justice. But she believes all men are genetically predisposed to pontificate (the expression 'mansplain' was unavailable in 2006?) and, anyway, were there a Bechdel test for books, this one would spectacularly fail it - she more or less only talks to men, and the few times she has a chat with a woman, it's about her he-man. As soon as I decently could, I put this dreck aside and picked up another book.

This one, Anna Kavan's Ice, has restored my faith in fiction. In a broken future, the world is slowly being consumed by ice, and the narrator searches obsessively for a broken woman he once loved and hoped to marry. The viewpoint constantly shifts in time; there are hallucinative episodes that superimpose on reality; the characters have no names, only descriptions; the weight of the cold engulfing the world produces an uneasy discontent in the mind of the reader; it is a harsh, tough book. Kavan herself was a troubled soul, a depressive and a drug addict, and one may speculate that the ice of the novel stands either for the tensions of the cold war (the book came out in 1967) or heroin. In this novel, however, she managed to momentarily bind her demons and squeeze out their essence into a bleak beauty.