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Ice and Fire
Traces a woman's search for identity through the painful labyrinth of sex, drugs, and prostitution in New York's Lower East Side
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
Andrea Dworkin
30 books1,494 followersAndrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women.
An anti-war activist and anarchist in the late 1960s, Dworkin wrote 10 books on radical feminist theory and practice. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, she gained national fame as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on pornography and sexuality, particularly in Pornography - Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), which remain her two most widely known books.
An anti-war activist and anarchist in the late 1960s, Dworkin wrote 10 books on radical feminist theory and practice. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, she gained national fame as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on pornography and sexuality, particularly in Pornography - Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), which remain her two most widely known books.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 29, 2020
It’s a long time since I’ve read anything by Andrea Dworkin and this is the first fiction; having previously read her feminist writings. This was her first novel. It was, at times, difficult (uncomfortable) to read and is going to be difficult to review. It was panned by many critics who did not see beyond the difficult content and simply missed many of the points Dworkin was trying to make.
The novel is a first person narrative and has strong (but limited) autobiographical elements; there are significant areas of difference with Dworkin’s life. The childhood described is very similar to Dworkin’s; an adored father and a mother who was unwell for years. The narrator was brought up in a Jewish neighbourhood and describes the strict divisions between neighbourhoods and the changing nature of childhood games. The tone of the novel changes abruptly as it switches to adulthood with the narrator living with a girlfriend in New York’s Lower East Side. Both women are regular drug users; they earn money in a variety of ways, but mainly by selling themselves, to men and women. The men around them are predatory and they are beaten and raped at various times. The descriptions are bleak and often brutal. The descriptions of the surroundings in this novel are remarkably good and Dworkin does have a good descriptive mode; especially when describing squalor and bad food. The narrator also spends time in Europe (paralleling Dworkin’s time in The Netherlands). She writes and seems to start to find her voice, and meets and marries a man who is impotent. As he finds his confidence through her he becomes increasingly abusive and violent and she is seriously hurt. She manages to get back to the States and lives alone (we won’t mention the rats) in an apartment in the Lower East Side, where she writes. The end of the novel revolves around struggles to get published. It could not be described as an upbeat novel and a number of reviewers have focussed on the abuse and violence, missing inner meanings. I sat back at one point and the light suddenly came on (It took a while!) and realised what was going on.
I think some background is helpful here. Dworkin is usually conveniently dismissed as being at the extreme end of the feminist spectrum (a reviewer on here refers to her as a “nutbar”). This is too easy as there is a great deal of nuance to her thought. I first read Dworkin in my late teens and early twenties, when I was also reading stuff by Brownmiller and Firestone. Her works on Intercourse and Pornography are very powerful and even more prescient today. The arguments are complex and Dworkin is not easily quotable (and I’m not reviewing Pornography here) , but this passage is illustratve;
“Everything in life is part of it. Nothing is off in its own corner, isolated from the rest. While on the surface this may seem self-evident, the favorite conceit of male culture is that experience can be fractured, literally its bones split, and that one can examine the splinters as if they were not part of the bone, or the bone as if it were not part of the body. This conceit replicates in its values and methodology the sexual reductionism of the male and is derived from it. Everything is split apart: intellect from feeling and/or body. Some part substitutes for the whole and the whole is sacrificed to the part. So the scientist can work on bomb or virus, the artist on poem, the photographer on picture, with no appreciation of its meaning outside itself; and even reduce each of these things to an abstract element that is part of its composition and focus on that abstract element and nothing else -- literally attribute meaning to or discover meaning in nothing else. In the mid-twentieth century, the post-Holocaust world, it is common for men to find meaning in nothing: nothing has meaning; Nothing is meaning. In prerevolutionary Russia, men strained to be nihilists; it took enormous effort. In this world, here and now, after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after Vietnam, after Jonestown, men need not strain. Nihilism, like gravity, is a law of nature, male nature. The men, of course, are tired. It has been an exhausting perioed of extermination and devastation, on a scale genuinely new, with new methods, new possibilities. Even when faced with the probable extinction of themselves at their own hand, men refuse to look at the whole, take all the causes and all the effects into account, perceive the intricate connections between the world they make and themselves. They are alienated, they say, from this world of pain and torment; they make romance out of this alienation so as to avoid taking responsibility for what they do and what they are. Male dissociation from life is not new or particularly modern, but the scale and intensity of this disaffection are new. And in the midst of this Brave New World, how comforting and familiar it is to exercise passionate cruelty on women. The old-fashioned values still obtain. The world may end tomorrow, but tonight there is a rape -- a kiss, a fuck, a pat on the ass, a fist in the face. In the intimate world of men and women, there is no mid-twentieth century distinct from any other century. There are only the old values, women there for the taking, the means of taking determined by the male. It is ancient and it is modern; it is feudal, capitalist, socialist; it is caveman and astronaut, agricultural and industrial, urban and rural. For men, the right to abuse women is elemental, the first principle, with no beginning unless one is willing to trace origins back to God and with no end plausibly in sight. For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when.”
Extrapolating from this Dworkin argues pornography is a very basic part of the structure of exploitation of women. In an interview with Michael Moorcock she put it more succinctly:
“Pornography is so important, I think, because of how it touches on every aspect of women's lower status: economic degradation, dehumanisation, woman hating, sexual domination, systematic sexual abuse. If someone thinks she can get women economic equality, for instance, without dealing in some way with the sexual devaluation of women as such, I say she's wrong; but I also say work on it, try, organise; I will be there for her,”
Dworkin has a particular complaint about De Sade and his approach to the world (“he embodies and defines male sexual values”). It has certainly been noted that Ice and Fire is a partial retelling of De Sade’s Juliette. However there are other elements. Dworkin herself said that Ice and Fire was an attempt to tell the truth about the intersection between poverty and sexual exploitation and it does this very well; the descriptive passages about poor housing are very powerfully written.
Towards the end of the novel the narrator is living alone and writing. Here is a woman in a room of her own, writing, without money and in poverty; rats in the walls and no one taking you seriously, but the writing is everything. Each chapter begins with a quote from literature; some of which Dworkin uses to pose questions and illustrate attitudes. Like the one from Dostoyevsky:
“Our women writers write like women writers, that is to say, intelligently and pleasantly, but they are in a terrible hurry to tell what is in their hearts. Can you explain why a woman writer is never a serious artist?”
There is also a meditative passage on the Kafka quote “Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together” which is profound and moving. It ends with the famous quote from Dworkin herself:
“I am a feminist. Not the fun kind.”
This novel is about degradation and survival in the face of being powerless and in poverty. It is powerful and uncomfortable, but it is brilliant with lots of hidden references, many of which I am sure I have missed. Dworkin is not easy and is much maligned and misunderstood. However the more I look at the internet the more I feel that her arguments about pornography may be fundamentally right.
Dworkin was passionate about writing and feminism;
“I've always considered writing sacred. I've come to consider the rights of women, including a right to dignity, sacred. This is what I care about. I don't want to give up what I care about.” (From her interview with Michael Moorcock).
The novel is a first person narrative and has strong (but limited) autobiographical elements; there are significant areas of difference with Dworkin’s life. The childhood described is very similar to Dworkin’s; an adored father and a mother who was unwell for years. The narrator was brought up in a Jewish neighbourhood and describes the strict divisions between neighbourhoods and the changing nature of childhood games. The tone of the novel changes abruptly as it switches to adulthood with the narrator living with a girlfriend in New York’s Lower East Side. Both women are regular drug users; they earn money in a variety of ways, but mainly by selling themselves, to men and women. The men around them are predatory and they are beaten and raped at various times. The descriptions are bleak and often brutal. The descriptions of the surroundings in this novel are remarkably good and Dworkin does have a good descriptive mode; especially when describing squalor and bad food. The narrator also spends time in Europe (paralleling Dworkin’s time in The Netherlands). She writes and seems to start to find her voice, and meets and marries a man who is impotent. As he finds his confidence through her he becomes increasingly abusive and violent and she is seriously hurt. She manages to get back to the States and lives alone (we won’t mention the rats) in an apartment in the Lower East Side, where she writes. The end of the novel revolves around struggles to get published. It could not be described as an upbeat novel and a number of reviewers have focussed on the abuse and violence, missing inner meanings. I sat back at one point and the light suddenly came on (It took a while!) and realised what was going on.
I think some background is helpful here. Dworkin is usually conveniently dismissed as being at the extreme end of the feminist spectrum (a reviewer on here refers to her as a “nutbar”). This is too easy as there is a great deal of nuance to her thought. I first read Dworkin in my late teens and early twenties, when I was also reading stuff by Brownmiller and Firestone. Her works on Intercourse and Pornography are very powerful and even more prescient today. The arguments are complex and Dworkin is not easily quotable (and I’m not reviewing Pornography here) , but this passage is illustratve;
“Everything in life is part of it. Nothing is off in its own corner, isolated from the rest. While on the surface this may seem self-evident, the favorite conceit of male culture is that experience can be fractured, literally its bones split, and that one can examine the splinters as if they were not part of the bone, or the bone as if it were not part of the body. This conceit replicates in its values and methodology the sexual reductionism of the male and is derived from it. Everything is split apart: intellect from feeling and/or body. Some part substitutes for the whole and the whole is sacrificed to the part. So the scientist can work on bomb or virus, the artist on poem, the photographer on picture, with no appreciation of its meaning outside itself; and even reduce each of these things to an abstract element that is part of its composition and focus on that abstract element and nothing else -- literally attribute meaning to or discover meaning in nothing else. In the mid-twentieth century, the post-Holocaust world, it is common for men to find meaning in nothing: nothing has meaning; Nothing is meaning. In prerevolutionary Russia, men strained to be nihilists; it took enormous effort. In this world, here and now, after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after Vietnam, after Jonestown, men need not strain. Nihilism, like gravity, is a law of nature, male nature. The men, of course, are tired. It has been an exhausting perioed of extermination and devastation, on a scale genuinely new, with new methods, new possibilities. Even when faced with the probable extinction of themselves at their own hand, men refuse to look at the whole, take all the causes and all the effects into account, perceive the intricate connections between the world they make and themselves. They are alienated, they say, from this world of pain and torment; they make romance out of this alienation so as to avoid taking responsibility for what they do and what they are. Male dissociation from life is not new or particularly modern, but the scale and intensity of this disaffection are new. And in the midst of this Brave New World, how comforting and familiar it is to exercise passionate cruelty on women. The old-fashioned values still obtain. The world may end tomorrow, but tonight there is a rape -- a kiss, a fuck, a pat on the ass, a fist in the face. In the intimate world of men and women, there is no mid-twentieth century distinct from any other century. There are only the old values, women there for the taking, the means of taking determined by the male. It is ancient and it is modern; it is feudal, capitalist, socialist; it is caveman and astronaut, agricultural and industrial, urban and rural. For men, the right to abuse women is elemental, the first principle, with no beginning unless one is willing to trace origins back to God and with no end plausibly in sight. For men, their right to control and abuse the bodies of women is the one comforting constant in a world rigged to blow up but they do not know when.”
Extrapolating from this Dworkin argues pornography is a very basic part of the structure of exploitation of women. In an interview with Michael Moorcock she put it more succinctly:
“Pornography is so important, I think, because of how it touches on every aspect of women's lower status: economic degradation, dehumanisation, woman hating, sexual domination, systematic sexual abuse. If someone thinks she can get women economic equality, for instance, without dealing in some way with the sexual devaluation of women as such, I say she's wrong; but I also say work on it, try, organise; I will be there for her,”
Dworkin has a particular complaint about De Sade and his approach to the world (“he embodies and defines male sexual values”). It has certainly been noted that Ice and Fire is a partial retelling of De Sade’s Juliette. However there are other elements. Dworkin herself said that Ice and Fire was an attempt to tell the truth about the intersection between poverty and sexual exploitation and it does this very well; the descriptive passages about poor housing are very powerfully written.
Towards the end of the novel the narrator is living alone and writing. Here is a woman in a room of her own, writing, without money and in poverty; rats in the walls and no one taking you seriously, but the writing is everything. Each chapter begins with a quote from literature; some of which Dworkin uses to pose questions and illustrate attitudes. Like the one from Dostoyevsky:
“Our women writers write like women writers, that is to say, intelligently and pleasantly, but they are in a terrible hurry to tell what is in their hearts. Can you explain why a woman writer is never a serious artist?”
There is also a meditative passage on the Kafka quote “Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together” which is profound and moving. It ends with the famous quote from Dworkin herself:
“I am a feminist. Not the fun kind.”
This novel is about degradation and survival in the face of being powerless and in poverty. It is powerful and uncomfortable, but it is brilliant with lots of hidden references, many of which I am sure I have missed. Dworkin is not easy and is much maligned and misunderstood. However the more I look at the internet the more I feel that her arguments about pornography may be fundamentally right.
Dworkin was passionate about writing and feminism;
“I've always considered writing sacred. I've come to consider the rights of women, including a right to dignity, sacred. This is what I care about. I don't want to give up what I care about.” (From her interview with Michael Moorcock).
February 11, 2013
I have done some stupid things in my time, for instance, riding down the M1 on the back of a motorbike in the rain, and getting on the tube in London to catch the last bus back to Nottingham and realising after four stations I was going the wrong way and so missing the last bus; anyway, reading this crazy book was one of those stupid things. Andrea Dworkin brilliantly subverts everything she tries to say women shouldn't do by writing a porny masochistic-ish horrible novel I guess as some kind of Awful Warning but it was like watching someone try to do heart surgery wearing oven gloves. The only good thing about this novel is that it's so obscure almost nobody has read it. Yay!
October 3, 2012
I'd just like to point out to readers who are not familiar with Andrea Dworkin's life, that this is not fiction as it says in my version of the book:
This is fiction and no resemblance to actual events, persons or locations is intended or should be inferred.
Rather this is based on Andrea's personal experiences and some events are retold in her novel Mercy. I am not quite sure why this has been classified as fiction. Maybe it was to protect Andrea or the people she mentions, or maybe it could only be published if it was classified as fiction.
Ice and Fire as the title suggests, is about the harrowing extremes of a woman's life. It begins with childhood and the first experiences of the domineering nurture of boys, and the discovery of racism and prejudice and injustice. Then the intense brutal experiences of adulthood, trying to survive in a world of poverty drugs and rape. The extremes one would go when they have no money to eat. To the self realisation of not wanting to be treated like a whore and struggling to make it as a female writer in a mans world. In the end, as a woman, your right to be treated like a human and not a whore doesn't matter to the male publisher who has the money and the power over your speech. Now, with so many obstacles how do we find the strength to stay true to ourselves?
I found this novel to be brutally honest, intense, gripping and explicit and I was deeply moved by it. I find it hard to understand how anyone could hate this woman or go through life misquoting her and not giving any of her books a chance.
This is fiction and no resemblance to actual events, persons or locations is intended or should be inferred.
Rather this is based on Andrea's personal experiences and some events are retold in her novel Mercy. I am not quite sure why this has been classified as fiction. Maybe it was to protect Andrea or the people she mentions, or maybe it could only be published if it was classified as fiction.
Ice and Fire as the title suggests, is about the harrowing extremes of a woman's life. It begins with childhood and the first experiences of the domineering nurture of boys, and the discovery of racism and prejudice and injustice. Then the intense brutal experiences of adulthood, trying to survive in a world of poverty drugs and rape. The extremes one would go when they have no money to eat. To the self realisation of not wanting to be treated like a whore and struggling to make it as a female writer in a mans world. In the end, as a woman, your right to be treated like a human and not a whore doesn't matter to the male publisher who has the money and the power over your speech. Now, with so many obstacles how do we find the strength to stay true to ourselves?
I found this novel to be brutally honest, intense, gripping and explicit and I was deeply moved by it. I find it hard to understand how anyone could hate this woman or go through life misquoting her and not giving any of her books a chance.
August 12, 2011
This took a long time to get through... when it hits the high notes the writing is transcendent but there are far too many repetitive passages throughout the novel. I found myself angry with Dworkin for her self-indulgence. No doubt this semi-autobiographical work was in a large sense a work of catharsis for the author, but as a novel it didn't satisfy me. Although I think it is worth reading, I was honestly relieved to have finished it. Dworkin is clearly a great writer with a lot to say - much of it utterly harrowing stuff - but Ice and Fire reads like a first draft of a potentially far greater work.
January 11, 2016
I thought it was really good. Very raw and emotional and idk it like screams to your soul.
Read
October 28, 2015In my opinion, her nonfiction is superior to this. That being said, I lean towards nonfiction over fiction pretty much everywhere, so take that with a grain of salt.
It's interesting, and it shows the complicated and nuanced relations between women and men, whether it's in the beginning, where her character is a prostitute, or in the end where she's a writer. She really gets at the dynamic between men and women when it comes to the end part of male publishers taking advantage of her character, and her characters descent into what I would consider insanity.
She doesn't shy away from writing about prostitutes and drugs; I think this is important because her portrayal is realistic. (She herself was prostituted in her youth). It's a good antidote to the happy hooker myth.
It's interesting, and it shows the complicated and nuanced relations between women and men, whether it's in the beginning, where her character is a prostitute, or in the end where she's a writer. She really gets at the dynamic between men and women when it comes to the end part of male publishers taking advantage of her character, and her characters descent into what I would consider insanity.
She doesn't shy away from writing about prostitutes and drugs; I think this is important because her portrayal is realistic. (She herself was prostituted in her youth). It's a good antidote to the happy hooker myth.
Read
March 4, 2013Andrea Dworkin ©© Ice and Fire Secker & Warburg London c 1986
144 pages
Read this in a single sitting yesterday. Sat up until two in the
morning to finish it. Very readable. Vivid descriptions. Lots
of sex. All the protagonists extremely unnattractive. Picked
the thing up thinking I knew vaguely that Dworkin was an
especially rabid man©hating feminist. (Where does this kind of
"knowledge" come from?) Felt vaguely that I might be able to
pretend I was reading a book by Philip Roth's wife. You know,
give the girls a chance to defend themselves. Turned out to be a
dumb idea on my part.
Book tells the story of a poor Jewish girl who gets a scholarship
to a classy private school and then to Harvard in the sixties.
Freaks out for reasons never made plain, but which have something
to do with gut horror of all the injustice in the world. Becomes
filthy living in filth. Is passive member of Lesbian couple with
especially wild partner. They take drugs unremittingly of every
description and fuck everybody in sight, male and female, for
small change, for breakfast. When her lover becomes seriously
ill, she rises to the occasion by fleeing to Europe, where she
does more fucking and takes more drugs. Finally she marries an
impotent man who is always very sad. She cures him of his
impotency and this makes him so wildly happy that he tries to
beat her to death. She goes back to the U.S. and spends years
living very quietly in a very small room in New York with a
typewriter and an insignificant puppy dog of a man who makes few
demands on her, determined to transform her bizarre life into
literature.
Finally, two of her books are published, by a gay male editor whoÔ��h)�0*0*0*°�°��Ô�was gang©raped as a boy, making him uniquely capable of
understanding her. Everybody hates her books and she goes on
starving. The gay publisher turns out to have the hots for her.
In fact, this is the only reason he published her in the first
place. In the end, she loses him because she refuses to sleep
with him on principle. She goes on starving.
What I really don't get is that Dworkin, if the starving writer
is her, is supposed to be devoting her entire existence as an
artist, feminist, thinker to getting a message across about RAPE.
This is the ultimate horror back to which all the lesser horrors
of life can be traced, but in all the part of the book which
recounts the experiences of the heroine which make her what she
has become in the end, rape does not play the main role.
Instead, the Dworkin character does terrible violence to herself
©© ingesting poisons without number for the kick, offering
herself freely to similarly numberless strangers, needlessly. It
is true that she lives in fear of rape during many years ©© so
would any woman who went to live in a filthy rathole surrounded
by a gang of macho Puerto Rican junkies. The thing is, very few
women live in such conditions.
One thing I liked about this writer -- her women are just as
awful as her men. She doesn't discriminate. She doesn't even
let herself get sentimental about members of the third world.
When she fucks an African for awhile, she declares it boring.
This is a big relief to all us poor white trash who are obsessed
with the fear that our women might prefer Africans. I now feel
much more relaxed about Africans.
144 pages
Read this in a single sitting yesterday. Sat up until two in the
morning to finish it. Very readable. Vivid descriptions. Lots
of sex. All the protagonists extremely unnattractive. Picked
the thing up thinking I knew vaguely that Dworkin was an
especially rabid man©hating feminist. (Where does this kind of
"knowledge" come from?) Felt vaguely that I might be able to
pretend I was reading a book by Philip Roth's wife. You know,
give the girls a chance to defend themselves. Turned out to be a
dumb idea on my part.
Book tells the story of a poor Jewish girl who gets a scholarship
to a classy private school and then to Harvard in the sixties.
Freaks out for reasons never made plain, but which have something
to do with gut horror of all the injustice in the world. Becomes
filthy living in filth. Is passive member of Lesbian couple with
especially wild partner. They take drugs unremittingly of every
description and fuck everybody in sight, male and female, for
small change, for breakfast. When her lover becomes seriously
ill, she rises to the occasion by fleeing to Europe, where she
does more fucking and takes more drugs. Finally she marries an
impotent man who is always very sad. She cures him of his
impotency and this makes him so wildly happy that he tries to
beat her to death. She goes back to the U.S. and spends years
living very quietly in a very small room in New York with a
typewriter and an insignificant puppy dog of a man who makes few
demands on her, determined to transform her bizarre life into
literature.
Finally, two of her books are published, by a gay male editor whoÔ��h)�0*0*0*°�°��Ô�was gang©raped as a boy, making him uniquely capable of
understanding her. Everybody hates her books and she goes on
starving. The gay publisher turns out to have the hots for her.
In fact, this is the only reason he published her in the first
place. In the end, she loses him because she refuses to sleep
with him on principle. She goes on starving.
What I really don't get is that Dworkin, if the starving writer
is her, is supposed to be devoting her entire existence as an
artist, feminist, thinker to getting a message across about RAPE.
This is the ultimate horror back to which all the lesser horrors
of life can be traced, but in all the part of the book which
recounts the experiences of the heroine which make her what she
has become in the end, rape does not play the main role.
Instead, the Dworkin character does terrible violence to herself
©© ingesting poisons without number for the kick, offering
herself freely to similarly numberless strangers, needlessly. It
is true that she lives in fear of rape during many years ©© so
would any woman who went to live in a filthy rathole surrounded
by a gang of macho Puerto Rican junkies. The thing is, very few
women live in such conditions.
One thing I liked about this writer -- her women are just as
awful as her men. She doesn't discriminate. She doesn't even
let herself get sentimental about members of the third world.
When she fucks an African for awhile, she declares it boring.
This is a big relief to all us poor white trash who are obsessed
with the fear that our women might prefer Africans. I now feel
much more relaxed about Africans.
March 12, 2012
A lot of people have a lot of stuff to say about Andrea Dworkin; it doesn't seem that a lot of these same people have actually read her. Though she is careful to differentiate this work from that of say, Kathy Acker--it is Dworkin's intention, at least to my understanding, for this to be a sort of cautionary tale or window into the harshness of reality, rather than what she would consider Acker's relatively pornographic or exploitative approach to the same subject matter--it probably doesn't hurt to have read some other harsh transgressive fiction before diving in here. And this book is unrelentingly bleak.
I will admit to having a bit of a voyeuristic interest in the whole urban hell of NYC in the '70s thing, and that probably helped keep the book engaging to me when I might otherwise have just had to look away. Prior to this book I had been one of those people with the lazy, tidy and uniformed categorization that Dworkin was simply a nutbar. I still haven't read much of her theoretical work, but my understanding of it--superficial though it may still be--has a distinctly more sympathetic tenor after having read this semi-autobiographical book. She might still be a nutbar, but she is certainly not coming from a place of unreality.
I will admit to having a bit of a voyeuristic interest in the whole urban hell of NYC in the '70s thing, and that probably helped keep the book engaging to me when I might otherwise have just had to look away. Prior to this book I had been one of those people with the lazy, tidy and uniformed categorization that Dworkin was simply a nutbar. I still haven't read much of her theoretical work, but my understanding of it--superficial though it may still be--has a distinctly more sympathetic tenor after having read this semi-autobiographical book. She might still be a nutbar, but she is certainly not coming from a place of unreality.
November 2, 2019
Parts of this book are very beautiful and poignant, and part just aren't. This is challenging to read because of the violence, and because of the looping narrative and the stream of consciousness prose. It is very clearly a novel about trauma, and it is in places beautiful and deeply meaningful. Sometimes the twisting narrative pulls you in, & sometimes it's absolutely impenetrable and redundant.
October 20, 2008
What a very angry woman! Insightful but...yikes!
May 18, 2023
My second Dworkin book after having my head caved in by Mercy. Similarly desperate, bleak and punishing, but still beautifully written, with what feels more like something resembling a narrative (possibly because it’s actually a memoir?). It definitely doesn’t have the allure of Mercy, and admittedly, some of the writing went over my head, but I can’t help but find Dworkin’s writing so striking and alluring. I’m excited to try her non-fiction next.
March 16, 2025
beautifully bleak and raw and horrifying. dworkin is always hard to read content wise, but her writing is so descriptive and insightful that i was fully immersed. mercy has stayed in my head for months and i am sure ice and fire will do the same. i wish we had more dworkin fiction.
November 12, 2021
Not the best novel, but still interesting, well-written and audacious.
December 10, 2022
3,5.
"I am a feminist, not the fun kind."
"I am a feminist, not the fun kind."
December 17, 2024
feels very much like a first draft of mercy, which i do prefer over this one. i wish dworkin wrote more fiction as her prose is so beautiful. need people to appreciate her fiction more!
January 10, 2025
beeindruckend und beängstigend. weil es real ist.
der Schreibstil ungewöhnlich, es hat Zeit gedauert, bis ich im Gedankenstrom wirklich drinnen war
dann war ich drin und habe es gefühlt: alles und nichts.
weil es real ist.
der Schreibstil ungewöhnlich, es hat Zeit gedauert, bis ich im Gedankenstrom wirklich drinnen war
dann war ich drin und habe es gefühlt: alles und nichts.
weil es real ist.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews