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WORK TITLE: Brother in Ice
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Avalos, Imma
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Spanish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016170500
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016170500
HEADING: Kopf, Alicia, 1982-
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046 __ |f 1982 |2 edtf
100 1_ |a Kopf, Alicia, |d 1982-
375 __ |a female
377 __ |a cat
400 1_ |a Ávalos, Imma, |d 1982-
670 __ |a Hermano de hielo, 2016: |b t.p. (Alicia Kopf) cover flap (Alicia Kopf, nombre artístico de Imma Ávalos; born 1982 in Gerona, Spain; studied fine arts, literary theory and comparative literature)
PERSONAL
Born 1982, in Girona, Spain.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
AWARDS:Documenta Prize, for Germà de Gel.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Outside of her writing, Alicia Kopf is known by another name: Imma Avalos. She hails from Spain, and has long involved herself in creative pursuits. Her debut book, Brother in Ice, is one example of her artistic endeavors. However, it came about through what some have described as nontraditional means.
Kopf explained the reasoning behind her book to Marta Bausells, an interviewer on the Guardian website. “In Brother in Ice the metaphor was polar exploring,” she began. “This metaphor is something I research quite deeply as it gives a structure to the whole book; it’s the lens through I will look at reality during a long period of time.” She went on to say: “In real life there is not a general concept, things are often meaningless and disperse, so I reshape my experience into something that makes some sense, that illuminates some kind of aspect of life beyond the real people and facts that inspired it.”
The book tells what, for Kopf, is a deeply personal tale, albeit through an alternative lens. At first glance, the novel seems to center around Kopf’s study of explorers traversing through the frozen tundras of the South and North Poles. Kopf seeks to uncover which explorer has actually traveled to these areas, as most have deemed them unreachable. Her candidates include Robert Falcon Scott, Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, and Frederick Cook. However, her research turns up nothing but inconclusive results; try as she might, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest any of the men truly accomplished their goals. Furthermore, Kopf finds that the goal of reaching one of the Poles is nigh impossible. The locations of these areas are in a constant state of flux, meaning the location of either Pole is up to the traveler’s perceptions; professionals cannot trace out an exact spot for either Pole.
However, Kopf soon comes to relate the efforts of her research to life with her family and her attempts to build an artistic career. Kopf finds that the Poles and their lack of any true spot on a geographical map can keenly describe her goals for her art and her sense of self. These two factors are ever moving, never rooted to one exact spot. She also relates the climate and imagery of the Poles to the experiences and life of her brother, who lives with autism. Kopf is just as curious about the internal world of her brother, who struggles to interact with the world around him and communicate his thoughts and needs, as she is about the icy landscape of the Poles. Kopf also takes a look at how the current state of society has affected her and those within her generation, as well as her interactions with those she knows and loves and the difficulties inherent with maintaining relationships.
“Kopf’s novel is enigmatic and playful,” remarked a Publishers Weekly contributor. They also described the book as containing “imaginative structure and strong, candid prose.” Jo Lateu, a reviewer in New Internationalist, called Brother in Ice a “brave and honest narrative.” In the Guardian Online, Lauren Elkin wrote: “Brother in Ice is finally about the tension between having a creative life that allows us to escape our everyday lives and responsibilities to our loved ones.” She added: “The places we start from – our selves, homes, loved ones – are as unknowable and unlocatable as the poles themselves.” Washington Post reviewer Connor Goodwin stated: “Brother in Ice reads like a diary, a travelogue, a collection of philosophical meditations and a series of historical research notes.” He also remarked: “The lack of a traditional plot is buoyed by the book’s startling pace, which makes for a fresh and invigorating read.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 30, 2018, review of Brother in Ice, p. 35.
New Internationalist, May, 2018, Jo Lateu, review of Brother in Ice, p. 40.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com (May 9, 2018), review of Brother in Ice; (May 21, 2018), Marta Bausells, “Alicia Kopf: ‘I wanted to turn old-fashioned, masculine epics upside down.'”
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 14, 2018), Courtney Maum, “The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #140: Alicia Kopf,” author interview.
Washington Post Online, https://www.washingtonpost.com (May 22, 2018), review of Brother in Ice.
Interview
Alicia Kopf: 'I wanted to turn old-fashioned, masculine epics upside down'
Marta Bausells
The first book interview
Fiction in translation
Brother in Ice is a form-busting novel that pairs a history of polar exploration with the story of an artist and her autistic sibling. The author reveals the real life behind her imaginative adventures
Marta Bausells @martabausells
Mon 21 May 2018 06.07 EDT Last modified on Tue 12 Jun 2018 05.18 EDT
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‘The perspective of the sibling is rarely told’ ... Alicia Kopf.
‘The perspective of the sibling is rarely told’ ... Alicia Kopf. Photograph: Lorenzo Cerrina
Brother in Ice is a novel (or is it?) that explores the history of polar expeditions, using them to examine a woman’s personal and artistic life, as well as her brother’s autism. The premise is convoluted – but Alicia Kopf makes it work, seamlessly building a hybrid of fiction, research notes, diary entries and illustration. The result is a lyrical, braided book, that would sit comfortably alongside the auto-fiction of Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, or the non-fiction of Leslie Jamison, blending reportage with the personal.
A Catalan writer born in Girona and living in Barcelona, Kopf is not only an author but a visual artist, too, and says the two art forms feel almost identical. “To me, writing is closer to the idea of film editing,” she says. “I create material, and all the while I tidy and edit. I identify more with someone who films scenes and later puts them together, than with someone who walks on a previously created path.” In the case of Brother in Ice, she started investigating and creating images around ice, exhibited them in a gallery, and crafted the story simultaneously.
Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf review – a polar obsession
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In reality, Kopf’s older brother is on the autism spectrum, a diagnosis that did not come until he was 30. “I believe that I’ve been able to talk about it more since then,” Kopf writes, in the voice of her unnamed narrator. “It is very important that things have a name, otherwise they don’t exist.” The brother is “a man trapped in ice … when he’s hungry he doesn’t go to the fridge, and when he’s tired he doesn’t go to bed. If we didn’t tell him what to do, he would remain blocked indefinitely.” Kopf’s narrator has lived a life on the sidelines, all her divorced parents’ attention focused on her sibling, whom she is conscious she can’t abandon.
Brother in Ice is an affecting novel, daring in both form and subject. Her portrayal of autism feels like an important insight, a radical new addition to existing narratives about disability. “The perspective of the sibling is rarely told,” she says. “It’s interesting because it has both enough distance – compared with the parent – and closeness [as] it’s what the sibling has known their whole life, so they can explain it in a more natural way.”
Stories like Forrest Gump or Rain Man negate the disability... they always want to ‘redeem’ the person or overcompensate
Alicia Kopf
She missed that perspective in “really well-written books such as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, or even in films such as Forrest Gump or Rain Man; what they do is negate the disability, making these characters do things that, in real life, they could not do.” Stories like these, she says, “always want to ‘redeem’ the person or overcompensate”.
Remarkably, Kopf manages to frame the whole book with an ice metaphor, which is intricately woven through and never feels shoehorned in. The life stories of early 20th-century male polar explorers (“symbols of survival”, she calls them) are placed alongside the day-to-day experience of a thirtysomething artist from a working-class background, hopping from one precarious job to another in an unnamed cold, class-ridden city representing Barcelona. She works in a white, freezing studio and is struggling with an impossible job market and her relationships. Of a guy she fancied who ignored her, she writes:
“Sometimes I imagined that he knew [about her attraction], and that his behaviour was caused by something keeping him from getting closer to me, perhaps some obligation I was oblivious to, some mission he had to accomplish before he could return. Like an explorer’s wife, I waited for him. I dubbed him Iceberg, believing I could only see one ninth of him.”
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The conceit began to take shape after Kopf experienced a period of recurring dreams about ice. A friend gave her the diary of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, and Kopf was away. After reading up on Shackleton, she moved on to American Arctic explorer Robert Peary, then his countryman Frederick Cook and his doctored photographs of his exploits, and on to Roald Admundsen’s victory at the South Pole and Robert Falcon Scott’s defeat. But their stories had already been told, so she didn’t repeat them. Brother in Ice, she is keen to emphasise, is not an exercise in nostalgia: “It is me appropriating these old-fashioned, colonialist, masculine epics. I wanted to turn them upside down and appropriate them as a woman and as an artist.”
She makes fascinating pit stops along the way, too, such as her reflections on mankind’s captivation with polar travel (why were so many men obsessed with conquering the poles?) and her analysis of polar photography (how best to illustrate such a grand, if elusive conquest when the goal is just a bunch of coordinates, set in an infinitely white, and constantly shifting, landscape?).
The book has won awards in both its original Catalan and its Spanish translation (by Kopf herself), with the New York Times recently picking it as one of several admirable novels by emerging Hispanic writers. In the Guardian, Lauren Elkin wrote of Maya Faye Lethem’s English translation: “Brother in Ice is finally about the tension between having a creative life that allows us to escape our everyday lives, and responsibilities to our loved ones. The places we start from – our selves, homes, loved ones – are as unknowable and unlocatable as the poles themselves.”
Of all these signs of her success, Kopf is most happy that “it confirms that the reader is capable of reading things that go beyond the usual product”. Writers, she notes, are not unlike polar explorers – fired up by a quest to “seek out something in an unstable space”. Readers, Kopf’s in particular, must be prepared for a journey into the unknown.
Brother in Ice is published by And Other Stories.
THE RUMPUS MINI-INTERVIEW PROJECT #140: ALICIA KOPF
BY COURTNEY MAUM
June 14th, 2018
Frozen explorers, hollow narrators, a brother suddenly unsure how to close his bedroom door—Brother in Ice is a lyrical peregrination that posits human relationships as a landscape of ice and snowstorms in which your true coordinates are impossible to define. It is a book that questions, piercingly, whether efforts to know oneself and one’s family ultimately enlighten or confuse. “I wonder if after all these years of study, work, and more or less failed relationships, Kopf asks, “I’ve been polishing myself or eroding myself. Is what’s left a gem, Kopf or a rock?” (Read an exclusive excerpt from the book here.)
Until the publication of this novel, Alicia Kopf (a pen name for Imma Ávalos Marqués), was primarily known in her native Spain as a multidisciplinary artist, where solo shows such as her premiere at the Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona won her a GAC-DKV prize for the best young artist’s show. It was in fact a cycle of art exhibitions (Àrticantàrtic) dedicated to the obsessions of polar explorers that led Kopf to write her debut novel.
Interestingly, Brother in Ice has gone through as many permutations as the age-old ice that so inspires Kopf. The book began as Germà de Gel in 2015, written in her native Catalan, which won Kopf the Documenta Prize for Catalan authors under thirty-five. In 2016, the Spanish edition came out as Hermano de Hielo with Alpha Decay, earning Kopf the prestigious Premi Llibreter prize in the same year. The English edition, exquisitely translated by Mara Faye Lethem, was released this year with And Other Stories, a UK-based publishing collective that crowdsources their supporter’s suggestions to bring exceptional books in translation to a wider audience.
At the time of writing, the English version of Brother in Ice is the number one new release in the “Polar Region Travel” category on Amazon. Is this a miscategorization? Is the miscategorization itself a form of performance art? Must travel guides actually lead you somewhere, or can they help you lose yourself? A recent review in the Guardian questioned the validity of the “novel” attribution given to Brother in Ice, and apparently, Amazon does as well. A deeply poetic collage of arctic research notes, photographs, mini-biographies and polar glossaries share space with diary entries—both fictionalized and not—that deep dive beneath the surface of the narrator’s brother’s autism to examine (and sometimes exacerbate) the fissures his condition has caused within her life. Very few of the explorers Kopf profiles in the book reach the place that they’d set out for, and it will be up to the reader to determine whether Kopf’s reaches her destination, either. Even the explorers who think they’ve reached their goal post are later deprived of this satisfaction: time and posterity come in to prove that they’d been off course the entire time, that they’d “discovered” a pole that had already been found by a competitor, had “conquered” a bleak and hostile area that had always existed, and would continue to exist, without concerning itself with whether it had been found.
The perhaps insurmountable task of knowing—truly knowing—the geographic coordinates to your own emotional life is achingly depicted in this book that celebrates both the valiant failings and the crystalized successes of the human enterprise. During both her Àrticantàrtic series of art installations and the writing of Brother in Ice, Kopf kept researching and producing, grappling and despairing. She isolated herself from friends and families to go further, look deeper, cut into the ice.
Gripped with what she calls her “white obsession,” Kopf’s narrator travels to Iceland only to end up sharing a dingy hostel room with a garrulous American, dancing with enormous Danes to Taylor Swift singles and signing up for day excursions while she waits for her lost luggage. The American keeps offering her French fries, she begrudgingly shares a jacuzzi with an older poet while his friends look on admiringly, the bus driver shouts facts about the island’s surface to his ticketed day trippers, but the passengers can’t hear him. On her last night in Reykjavik, the narrator questions the purpose of her pilgrimage, only to realize upon waking that she hadn’t experienced a single moment of the nostalgia that usually plagues her while she was in Iceland. “It’s much easier to get to the arctic,” Kopf writes, “than to reach certain areas of one’s self.”
Novel, travelogue, thesis, memoir, this unwieldy gift: in its furious quest to understand everything while reverencing the unknowable, perhaps Brother in Ice does belong in the Polar Arctic Travel section of the world’s biggest electronic commerce company, right near the current fifth-place holder, The Outpost of the Lost.
Alicia and I corresponded by email about her thrilling debut.
***
The Rumpus: At one point in the book, you suggest that “affection” is the most highly valued asset in expensive schools. Can you expound on this—do you think this is true?
Alicia Kopf: Before I could make a living from my art I worked in different sorts of schools. One of them was a private expensive school where the parents were so busy (most of them were rich and/or famous) that the care of their children was often delegate to different paid caregivers. In terms of affection, some of these children were poor. At the same time (and that makes them different from the less privileged), these children were very powerful and they were aware of that: if some of them didn’t like a teacher and convinced their parents, the teacher would be fired. I think love and care is very fundamental in education, and the family is not the only necessary source of it, I just feel that in this specific context other interests were mixed. I wonder how growing in this atmosphere shapes a person.
Rumpus: The back jacket describes this as a “hybrid novel”: part travelogue, part fictionalized diary, part research notes. I’m interested in hearing more about your process of fictionalizing the diary entries. How did you go about feeling out when the truth was needed? How did you know when it was time for fiction?
Kopf: The writing process comes from both journaling and rewriting to shape a literary artifact where everything is connected through a metaphor. In Brother in Ice the metaphor was polar exploring. This metaphor is something I research quite deeply as it gives a structure to the whole book; it’s the lens through I will look at reality during a long period of time. In real life there is not a general concept, things are often meaningless and disperse, so I reshape my experience into something that makes some sense, that illuminates some kind of aspect of life beyond the real people and facts that inspired it.
Rumpus: In another section, you write that “an inexpressible story can kill the person who lived through it.” Do you want to talk about the ways in which people are kept from telling their stories? Or what makes a story impossible to express?
Kopf: Both aspects are related: this sort of hidden “killer stories” are in part the result of social repression and/or they often don’t emerge because we don’t recognize that they are within us until we recognize it somewhere else; in the press, in literary fiction, etc. We need narrative patterns to understand reality. Creating a new narrative pattern is very difficult, almost an heroic task, it’s walking on ice: very disorientating and lonely. But if you find the way, you will give a survival tool to the readers.
Rumpus: For a book that is very much about being an outsider, what is it like to have your work translated in a language other than your native tongue? Have you read the English translation? Did you play a role in the translation?
Kopf: I think a writer, especially in a first novel, is always an outsider. Now I’m invited at important cultural events, but I’ll always feel like an outsider that has sneaked in the party.
Being translated into English is a great opportunity and also a proof that the story can be read outside its national context. For me it is very important, because I want my stories to be universal. I read Mara Faye Lethem’s translation before it was published; she is a great translator and asked me about the details of the translation that she thought were important to discuss.
Rumpus: The mother/daughter dynamic in this book is beautiful and conflicted and very complicated. What has the process of being published been like for you, of having family and friends be able to read you, and imagine that they are either in the book or not?
Kopf: It’s always difficult to write about one’s own family, and I think it’s even more difficult for women because we are educated to be people-pleasers and often solvers of the conflicts within the family. Brother in ice is mainly a research about important aspects of my identity (as having an autistic brother), and when I wrote it I didn’t think about it being published, I just wanted to discover who I was and where all this family ice came from. Depicting some aspects of the real relationship with my mother was unavoidable. I gave her the original to read before publishing the book and she was angry, especially because of the description of my brother. I suppose it is very difficult for a mother to accept this depiction of a son, even if its very realistic and precisely because of that. My perspective as a sister gives me a more horizontal point of view. After some months she understood that this description would help people understand better what is autism and what represents to a family, so she was proud. Other families with autistic members or any member with disabilities have expressed gratitude to me to show some of the habitual dynamics as they are not often represented in literature in a natural way.
Rumpus: In your research notes about Captain Shackleton’s dangerous mission across the Antarctic, you write that “something sank inside the captain” when he returned to solid ground, that “the domestic realm can be the most difficult territory to settle.” I found this very striking and true. Could you expound on what you meant?
Kopf: I think being in the challenging state of adventure with its peaks and its epic nature makes for an easy comparison to some sort of family relationships, the ones one cannot choose or avoid and one has to endure through the whole life. Usually the home is a land of drama, also of joy, but I’m not talking about it in this book: In Brother of Ice I wanted to bring the epic inside the home.
Rumpus: My understanding is that you a cycle of art works for this project. Why did you feel that a book was necessary to complement—or perhaps complete—this cycle of works?
Kopf: When I started this cycle called Articantartic I knew I wanted to write a novel, but as I was then considered a visual artist and I got offers to exhibit, I used my research materials and my drawings as exhibition materials and I let the new materials and experiences that came up to feedback the narrative process. Some of the drawings I exhibited then are also in the book.
Rumpus: Is all of your creative work attributed to your pen name, “Alicia Kopf”? If you are comfortable talking about it, why did you want a pen name?
Kopf: My real name is public, I don’t hide it, but as I inherited it I like to create my own. Alicia Kopf is the name of a character in my first book. It was an artistic book with images and almost no text, and the image of a girl who was headless. She was looking for her head—her identity—through the blank pages of the book. I still do the same, but through literature.
***
Author photograph © Laia Gutierrez.
Courtney Maum is the author of the novels Touch and I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, and the forthcoming books, Costalegre and After the Book Deal. She is also the founder of the interdisciplinary creative getaway, "thecabinsretreat.com. Find her on Twitter at @cmaum. More from this author →
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Print Marked Items
Brother in Ice
Publishers Weekly.
265.18 (Apr. 30, 2018): p35.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Brother in Ice
Alicia Kopf, trans, from the Catalan by Mara Feye Lethem. And Other Stories (Consortium, dist.), $15.95
trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-911-50820-5
Early in Kopf's inventive novel, her first to be translated into English, the unnamed narrator declares her
desire to create "a new epic, without foes or enemies; an epic involving oneself and an idea." This
declaration forms the central conceit of the novel, in which Kopf's narrator--a Catalan artist and writer--
wrestles with herself, her family, and her life as an artist. Framing this struggle is her ongoing creative
exploration into "the place of early-20-century polar explorers in the collective imagination," which is
reflected in chapters dedicated to the history of explorers like Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton. Lovers,
friends, and jobs move through the narrator's world, only infrequently meriting more than a few pages.
Instead, the majority of the action is internal, with the frozen poles setting the metaphorical stage for the
narrator's struggle with her own identity. It is an exercise in bringing "a series of metaphors face-to-face
with reality." Kopf's novel is enigmatic and playful, and what it lacks in conventional story it makes up for
in imaginative structure and strong, candid prose. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Brother in Ice." Publishers Weekly, 30 Apr. 2018, p. 35. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537852224/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ee3ea809.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A537852224
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Brother in Ice
Jo Lateu
New Internationalist.
.512 (May 2018): p40.
COPYRIGHT 2018 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
Full Text:
Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (And Other Stories, ISBN 978 1911508205)
From the heart of Europe, Catalan Alicia Kopf's narrator (who may or may not be a fictionalized version of
the author) finds herself drawn to the mysteries of the polar world, and she starts researching the explorers,
scientists and artists whose life mission it was to unravel them. Snowflakes, snow globes and I the
wonderfully named ice blinks all hold a fascination for her, as does the polar silence which seems to reflect
the situation of her autistic brother, who is unable to express himself properly and whose actions freeze up,
so that simple tasks take lengthy amounts of time.
But like ice, this work--part research notes, part fictionalized diary, part travelogue--has many layers, and
the most interesting are those that focus on the narrator's own challenges as she undergoes an inner
exploration of her creativity, her relationship with lovers and with her family --which she refers to as a 'cold
war'--and the effects of recession and austerity on herself and her peers. Her inner journey, which she
describes as a 'personal deconstruction', leaves her bruised and fragile, so she escapes to Iceland, her
personal utopia, acknowledging that 'it is much easier to get to the Arctic than to reach certain areas of
oneself'.
It is possible to escape to the ends of the earth, to seek the numbing of pain that can be found in ice and
snow. But, as this brave and honest narrative reveals, the most important journey we can undertake is
inwards--and that requires the courage to allow oneself to thaw.
*** JL
andotherstories.org
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lateu, Jo. "Brother in Ice." New Internationalist, May 2018, p. 40. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536746347/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fa6948c3.
Accessed 26 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536746347
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Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf review – a polar obsession
Fiction
Fact and fiction are interweaved in an artist’s investigation of illness, exploration and creativity, translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
Lauren Elkin
Wed 9 May 2018 10.01 EDT Last modified on Fri 11 May 2018 19.10 EDT
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Ernest Shackleton’s ship HMS Endurance, 1915.
Ernest Shackleton’s ship HMS Endurance, 1915. Photograph: Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge/Getty Images
Catalan artist Alicia Kopf’s Brother in Ice came about unusually for a work of fiction: it was generated via a series of art exhibitions called Àrticantàrtic, an “exploration of exploration” in which Kopf pursued the pursuers of the white places on the Earth, people who journeyed to the extremes of north and south just to see what was there.
The novel – if that’s what we can call it – integrates these preoccupations, but contextualises them within the life of a young woman living in Barcelona, whose older brother, M, is autistic, though the doctors cannot identify where on the spectrum to place him. The human body itself is an unknowable landscape within which doctors can only diagnose through approximation and calculation. We meet M in interludes between research notes, illustrations (taken from Kopf’s gallery shows), mini-essays on explorers’ journeys, and the narrator’s diary entries. Kopf describes M as a “man trapped in ice”: alive beneath it, looking out at the world, he is both “there” and “not there”.
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This finds an unexpected echo in the author’s preoccupation with polar explorers, people such as Louise Boyd, who had already led seven expeditions by the time she became the first woman to fly over the Earth’s rotational axis in 1955, aged 68. On a journey to the Arctic through Norway, she said of the ice she could glimpse in the distance: “I want to be there, looking out, instead of here, looking in.”
Kopf frequently juxtaposes science with the metaphysical, or with quotidian banality. Set against the growing body of “facts” and “documents” that preoccupy the narrator, the status of the personal material is less certain; is it fiction or non-fiction, and does it matter? How much can we ever trust what we are told in a novel; is the writer looking in or out? The narrator herself is obliquely acknowledged to be a fictional invention, both there and not there: at one point she identifies herself as Alicia Kopf, who is, of course, the author of the book we’re reading, but Alicia Kopf is actually the pseudonym of a woman called Imma Ávalos Marquès, whose name is on the copyright page. “I’m not an author,” Kopf writes, “just an explorer of my limited textual possibilities.” A writer, she shows us, is a kind of polar explorer: both are driven by an obsession with abstraction; both are “seeking out something in an unstable space”.
Alicia Kopf: a preoccupation with polar explorers.
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Alicia Kopf: a preoccupation with polar explorers. Photograph: Miquel Benitez/Getty Images
From the outset the narrative establishes its twin points of reference: the north and south poles, in a recurring reference to the dispute over who truly “conquered” them. It seems that today, most researchers believe that neither Robert Peary nor Frederick Cook actually reached the north pole. A couple of years later, Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott raced to see who could reach the south pole first. Scott arrived a month too late. Amundsen became a hero; Scott and his men died on the way home. Scott was underprepared, while Amundsen’s successfully exacting technique – calculate, measure, recalculate, remeasure – strikes Kopf as “so formal and unheroic […] like the process of writing and editing a text,” she observes in a footnote. But Kopf gradually collapses every binary she sets up; the poles are not fixed, but drift with the ice. We have no way of knowing if any of the four men actually made it to either pole; we only know they made it to a place they took to be the pole. Scientific fact has a way of becoming obscured in the white-out of extreme weather. Instead of maintaining the poles as two distinct places on the map, Kopf blends them into one: “Arcticantarctic, that place I’m trying to circumscribe with text and whose centre I hope to someday conquer.”
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About a third of the way into the novel, Kopf quotes a speech made by the Catalan oceanographer Pepita Castellví, which itself concludes with a quote from Ernest Shackleton: “The Polar regions leave a profound mark on those who have struggled in them, which is difficult to express to men who have never left the civilised world.” This seems like an apt summary of what it means to be an artist or a writer. Brother in Ice is finally about the tension between having a creative life that allows us to escape our everyday lives and responsibilities to our loved ones. The places we start from – our selves, homes, loved ones – are as unknowable and unlocatable as the poles themselves. The dialectic between home and away collapses in the polar whiteness of the creative process, which Kopf describes as a “territory” that is “not yet visible to me”: “If it were, I wouldn’t write.” If it were easy to get to, everyone would go. But then, Kopf notes, “It’s much easier to get to the Arctic than to reach certain areas of one’s self.”.
Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is published by Vintage.
• Brother in Ice is published by &other Stories. To order a copy for £7.49 (RRP £10) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Books Review
A mysterious journey to the middle of the Earth — and the center of the self
By Connor Goodwin
May 22
In the early 19th century, Capt. John Cleves Symmes Jr. thought the Earth had two holes located at the North and South poles that led to inner worlds. “I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within,” he said, “containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other.”
The Hollow Earth theory inspired several works of literature, including “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” by Jules Verne, and, most recently, “Brother in Ice,” by Alicia Kopf.
(And Other Stories)
What began for Kopf as a historical investigation of polar expeditions shifted into a critical look at her polar obsession, her family and art.
The result is this unconventional Catalan novel, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, that won an English PEN Award.
Written in short bursts, like dispatches from the Arctic, “Brother in Ice” takes readers on an unlikely journey. The table of contents looks like Kopf went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and ended up with 20 tabs on subjects ranging from British explorer Ernest Shackleton to snow globes. The most fascinating sections compare artists and explorers who, Kopf suggests, share the same ambition to make “the invisible visible.”
At various times, “Brother in Ice” reads like a diary, a travelogue, a collection of philosophical meditations and a series of historical research notes. The lack of a traditional plot is buoyed by the book’s startling pace, which makes for a fresh and invigorating read.
The wide scope of subject and style may seem freewheeling, but the book is actually structured around Symmes’s Hollow Earth theory. The narrative voice takes the form of seven concentric figures based on the author at different stages in her life. In this way, Kopf’s journey is not only northward but inward. Through her polar research, she comes to recognize it is “easier to get to the Arctic than to certain areas of one’s self.” Kopf views this interior and domestic quest as a new kind of epic, “the epic of remaining in the place where we are and enduring what life has dealt us.”
Connor Goodwin is a writer based in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in the Rumpus and Entropy.
BROTHER IN ICE
By Alicia Kopf
Translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
And Other Stories. 320 pp. Paperback, $15.95