Brother In Ice is an exercise in trust—a risky venture, not unlike the expeditions into the blank canvas of the polar regions that Alicia Kopf traces in the early chapters of her ambitious hybrid novel. There is a distinct sense that the Catalan artist and writer is thinking out loud, mapping her own haphazard journey across the page. She could have lost her way, slipped into a crevasse and disappeared beneath the weight of her own icebound mission. But no. What she has produced, in the end, through an eclectic and inventive blend of autobiographical fiction, arctic-inspired scientific detours, and historical diversions, is a thoughtful meditation about identity, family, and the challenges of trying to explore one’s self through art.
To dissect Brother In Ice is to risk making it sound strange, possibly unreadable, but Kopf’s balance and restraint hold its often disparate pieces together. The opening section of the book, “Frozen Heroes”, reflects the narrator’s obsession with all things polar: shipwrecks, penguins, the anatomy of snowflakes, and, above all, the heroic, often reckless, rush to explore the furthermost regions of the globe and endure extreme conditions, all with the desire to lay claim to undefined spaces, explain mysteries and achieve impossible goals. To be the first. Grainy black and white archival photographs add to the accounts, but what allows such brief, nonfictional excursions to work is the author’s light hand and thoughtful voice. In these early pages we are also offered our first glimpse into the narrator’s family and personal life. In particular we are introduced to her autistic older brother:
My brother is a man trapped in ice. He looks at us through it; he is there and he is not there. Or more precisely, there is a fissure inside him that periodically freezes over. When he is present, his outline is more clearly defined; other times he’s submerged for a while.
He is interested in planes, trains, cars, cats, dogs and birds, inclined to watch them carefully and intently, but he is consistently unable to carry out ordinary tasks without being cued or asking what he should do. His presence, in what is ultimately a broken family, is significant.
The scientific diversions continue into the second section, “Library Atop an Iceberg” but gradually the autobiographically toned fiction moves to center stage. After a rather defiant adolescence, complicated by negotiating the rough terrain between her divorced parents, the narrator makes her way to university where she persists in studying art and literature, worrying about the practicality of pursuing endeavours that are likely to be less than self-sustaining. She supports herself, first in retail and then with odd teaching jobs, has her first serious romance, and ultimately, her first art show. She travels, struggles to get along with her mother, and worries about what will become of her brother and her responsibility for him as he ages. The chapters, if you can call them that, are short, vignettes and reflections, played out against glacial motifs.
Finally, in the third section, she visits Iceland.
Throughout this unusual novel, the narrator herself is on a quest. She is not even certain what it is that she is searching for. Like the polar explorers, in pursuit of a shifting point on the ice, in a vast white terrain, she is writing in an effort to render the invisible visible. This is the artist’s quest—one in which the question may be as elusive and ill-defined as the answer. Near the end of the first part, the narrator admits:
I often find myself getting stuck in this project. I see nothing before me, just white. Yet beneath there are many things. The shrieking of seals. Was it the poles I wanted to talk about? Or is it just the image of the snow that fascinates me? Instability, confusion, cold (it’s hot), determination. Sensations that were the constant companions of the polar explorers, as well as those of us who work with the blank white page. Because I’m not interested in the polar explorers in and of themselves, but rather in the idea of investigation, of seeking out something in an unstable space. I’d like to talk about all of that as a metaphor, because what interests me is the possibility of an epic, a new epic, without foes or enemies; an epic involving oneself and an idea. Like the epic that artists and writers undertake.
Hers is a journey that resonated deeply with me. Especially as a writer working in the uneasy territory of memoir, I loved the openness, the questioning, the self-doubt Kopf allows her narrator (and presumably herself) as this odd creation takes shape. As her own questions and explanations start to come into focus, the layers of inspiration that preceded her quest, finally start to make sense. The beauty of this book is not simply that it is an intriguing and original account of one woman’s coming to terms with some of the unresolved fractures in her own history, it is a challenge to other explorers who venture forth with pen or paintbrush in hand to forge their own paths as they seek to tell their stories.
Brother In Ice by Alicia Kopf is translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem, and published by And Other Stories.
roughghosts 
You certainly liked this a lot more than I did. I just didn’t feel the various elements coalesced at all. It struck me that Kopf’s own story was rather insipid and lacking in depth (I didn’t find her particularly open; discussing herself she often seemed vague), and she had therefore Googled Arctic exploration and added the autistic brother in a search for gravitas. (I don’t necessarily mean she did this in a cynical way – I’m sure she saw connections)
(It’s also possibly not a good idea in principle to talk about what a tough time you’re having while inserting stories of people whose experiences seem much tougher).
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Interesting. I liked the kind of spare and detached quality of the narrative as a whole. I saw it as an exploration of the value of any creative endeavour. You can also argue that the scientific value of searching for the pole was also dubious and one of vanity. The interest in polar expeditions actually predates the book as part of a larger art exhibit, so although I’d be inclined to think that the narrator’s life is likely more fictional than autobiographical, I understand that it is based on the author’s own life (including the brother). Interestingly she is writing under a pseudonym that she gives her narrator.
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