The Ice Palace (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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Vesaas beautifully captures this so tentative pre-adolescent fumbling towards relationships, both between Unn and Siss, and then among all their classmates. The very next day the new girl skips school and goes to see a giant ice cave formed by freezing water around a waterfall. The girl is never seen again despite days of searching. The ice palace of the title is a natural structure that has built up around a half-frozen waterfall in the woods outside the village. The passages describing Unn's exploration of this eerie place are among the most extraordinary and poetic in the book – indeed the poetry so weighs on the prose that eventually one chapter is completely overtaken: Siss and Unn are eleven years old and as different from each other as fire and water. Siss is lively and outspoken and even a little bossy with her friends. Unn is introverted and reticent, sitting alone at the edge of the playground. Siss comes from a content and comfortable family, with parents who give her a lot of leeway to express herself. Unn is an orphan with an unknown runaway father and has recently lost her mother to illness, now living with an elderly aunt. Yet from the first time their eyes meet across a schoolyard they feel connected. Too young and inexperienced to know how to express their feelings, shy and yet filled with yearning. Naked flames of innocence and enthusiasm, they shed their clothes and danced around each other, coming very close then jumping away in fright at the intensity of the feeling. Vesaas the poet knows how to go beyond mere words to capture the moment, in the first of a couple of lyrical passages that mark the high points of the story for me: In making it a childhood passage where purity is overlaid on violation Vesaas writes a chapter that is almost unbearable in its poignancy.

She behaves almost bewitched, and I was under the same spell. I wanted to shout at her GET OUT OF THERE, and at the same time, I needed to know what was in there, too.Meet death and then the birth of the phoenix. What is the wild bird doing and what is the significance? The woodwind players too... At first the palace seems difficult to penetrate, but Unn suddenly finds a tiny gap she can squeeze through and then another, journeying through the palace where she finds a succession of rooms: and where it beat off competition from a shortlist of books that had weathered well, including Cortazar's Hopscotch, Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from the Sea, Boll's The Clown, and Plath's The Bell Jar. I appreciated the simple lyrical writing, at times almost like poetry. The story kept my interest, but I thought it a got a bit repetitive or drawn-out and the whole story became too much like a fable. It seemed to me to stretch plausibility that one girl would become so obsessed or infatuated with the other girl after a few hours during one evening at her house (even though some odd stuff goes on). I felt I was reading a fable by Paulo Coelho, which I'm not a fan of.

When she arrived inside the next one she caught her breath at what she saw: she was in the middle of a petrified forest. An ice forest.

Das Eisschloss (1963) von Tarjei Vesaas ist einer jener Klassiker, die lange unter meinem Radar flogen. Ich meine, es ist überhaupt mein erstes Buch eines norwegischen Schriftstellers. Auf BookTube, vermehrt im englischsprachigen Raum, hielten es jedoch immer mehr Leute in die Kamera und so wurde auch ich darauf aufmerksam. Ich vermute, dass es an dem wunderschönen Cover der Penguin Classics-Ausgabe liegt, die so erst 2018 erschien. Wie dem auch sei, ich bin froh, es endlich gelesen zu haben. This novel reads like a long form poem as there is so much below the surface and the actual words. It is filled with symbols and metaphors that are very direct to the plot and characters and open up a much broader understanding of Siss and her tribulations. While the prose is swift and the novel is short, you would do well to slow down and really examine what Vesaas has written much as you would do with any poem. Without giving anything away, the ice palace found in the novel can be viewed on many different levels; from a symbol of several of the characters, as death, or even as the novel itself. I don’t want to go into it as not to provide spoilers but after reading this I felt cheated that I didn’t read this for a class and didn’t have an essay to formulate as I had so much to say about all of Vesaas’ hidden messages.

And they part with a promise from Unn that when they next meet she will tell Siss a secret. But the next morning, fearing what might happen, Unn decides to defer the encounter and instead of going to school, heads to see the Ice Palace instead: She saw to it that she almost never met those eyes. She did not yet dare to do so – only in a few swift snatches when she forgot. The pieces are all set for the magic to start. Siss, the popular leader of her peers at school and the beloved daughter of a well-off family, begins the journey with no return to become Unn, the introverted, mysterious girl, who leads an isolated life with her aunt, wrapped up in an irresistible and unsettling aura. Two gleaming faces in a mirror become one in a radiant moment, memory and dreams are fused into an impossible reality and Unn becomes Siss and Siss becomes Unn, scorching twin souls emerge amidst the implacable coldness of their existence, producing a miracle. Or a curse. For this world is made for the living, and that is a lesson Siss will have to learn if she wants to break free from a heavy burden which is drowning her in the mesmerizing but already thawing chambers of The Ice Palace. Is-slottet. - Oslo: De norske bokklubbene, 2002. - 124 p. - (Århundrets bibliotek) - ISBN 82-525-5096-7 (hardcover)I promise to think about no one but you. To think about everything I know about you. To think about you at home and at school and on the way to school. To think about you all day long, and if I wake up at night.” They've found each other, and for each it's both a terrifying discovery and a relief, even as so much has been left unsaid.

Even in its conclusion there are obvious comparisons to the sexual act: when last we see her: "She wanted to sleep; she was languid and limp and ready". Tarjei Vesaas es uno de los novelistas noruegos más importantes del siglo XX, entre sus obras más famosas destaca «El palacio de hielo» que fue publicado en 1963. Gracias a esta editorial podemos disfrutar de un libro escandinavo excepcional, con una edición inmejorable y una nota de editor que nos vuelve a brindar un cierre encomiable a la par que maravilloso a la lectura. Siss leaves promptly and Unn suffers pangs of doubt. Had she overshared? Did Siss feel the same way? Was she imagining their connection? There had been an unusually long period of severe frost this autumn ... There was a waterfall some distance away that has built up an extraordinary mountain of ice around it during this long, hard period of cold. It was said to look like a palace, and nobody could remember it happening before.Only one fatal meeting is granted by the author between the two girls. Inside Unn's closed bedroom, through a looking glass, they spot the connection that occurs from their common nature, they undress to further justify their mutual attraction and proceed no more because of guilt and their inability to find the right words to describe what is happening to them: