The book is quite dark in parts, however it is extremely descriptive and creates great imagery for children. After reading the story with year 3 children they produced some brilliant descriptive story writing with a focus on interesting adjectives and adverbs.

Tarjei Vesaas is sometimes described as a modernist, but at moments in this novel – which is as stark and bare as a tree in midwinter – he seems more like a symbolist. Small elements of the natural world are freighted with enormous coded significance, and much is left unsaid: we never find out what Unn's great secret was, nor is the girls' mutual attraction ever really explained. Yet the prose itself is appealingly clear and straightforward, an effect that must have been heightened in the original by the fact that Vesaas wrote, unusually, in Nynorsk, instead of the traditional literary dialect of Bokmål. The contemporary English translation from Elizabeth Rokkan reads entirely naturally, I thought, and gives you a very clear idea of why Vesaas is considered such a giant of Norwegian letters. Esta es la historia de una amistad que se forja fugazmente, con una intensidad puramente inocente y genuina entre dos niñas de once años. Sucederá algo que cambiará radicalmente lo que pudo ser pero no fue, pero no por ello quedará en el olvido. Cobrará importancia el palacio de hielo que se forma cuando la cascada se hiela en invierno, sus enormes salas dotadas de vida y los seres que habitan en los bosques harán de este un lugar mágico y simbólico. rly beautiful and intense sublimated lesbian movie...the whole sequence of unn in the ice palace ;_; gestures and unspoken desires are what animate this, the dialogue really isnt important b/c its all in their faces.. No one can witness the fall of the ice palace. It takes place at night, after all the children are in bed.”I would have to recommend this movie for at least a watch once if you are able, I did and in a way I enjoyed it, however I don't think I will ever get around to watching it again.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. No doubt this is a beautiful little story, told in a nice simple prose, but it didn't resonate as strongly with me as it clearly did with a lot of other readers. I found The Birds to be the better of the two novels I've read.Some day she'll tell me.Ich weiß nicht, wie diese Anziehungskraft zwischen den Mädchen in den 60er-Jahren rezipiert wurde (oder was Vesaas Intentionen waren), aber aus heutiger Sicht ist sie bemerkenswert, diese Mischung aus Neugier, Bewunderung und Erotik, die sich auf Unn konzentriert. Siss hat (noch) kein Vokabular für diese neuen Dinge, die sie da fühlt. Sie weiß nur, dass sie Unn unbedingt treffen muss. Vesaas schafft es, diese Intensität und Dringlichkeit, die die Pubertät vieler zeichnen, einzufangen. Es wurde auch an mich herangetragen, dass Das Eisschloss in Norwegen mittlerweile als queerer Klassiker gefeiert wird – das wundert mich nicht. Siss insists on being part of it -- and as someone who talked to Unn so recently they keep asking her whether or not Unn might have said something to indicate where she went, or why. 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. The Ice Palace seemed at times a prose poem, a gelid one. Descriptions, in particular of coldness, and of ice, and of darkness, with the ice palace looming as the undecipherable symbol, but which undeniably withholds death, are the sparkling and biting gems in this book. The children are remarkably convincing as characters (and unlike most found in fiction, where the temptation to make them too precocious or cute seems almost impossible for authors to resist).

Yet this simple story has touched me deeply with its eerie beauty, its sadness and especially with the things left unsaid, unexplained: the silences, the unfinished gestures, the loneliness, the indifference and the mystery of winter landscape to the incursions of the human intruders upon its domain. View of the palace is absolutely stunning. Shiny, cold and inaccessible and yet so tempting. Dainty, lace decorating, slender columns, openwork lace. Chambers sparkling with colors, white, blue, green. Somewhere in the distance a waterfall roars and in the icy walls - trapped eye of the sun. Come in, Unn. Get some rest. I’m a worthless creature,’ said Auntie shortly afterwards, when they were nearing her house, nearing the end of the evening. She began again: ‘Worthless. The people here have done everything for me during this misfortune, and now I’m going like this when I ought to take my leave properly".Turnbull, Andrew (1962) [1954]. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. LCCN 62-9315– via Internet Archive. This room seemed to be made for shouting in, if you had someting to shout about, a wild shout about companionship and comfort. The film stayed true to the book... more or less. Casting the girls several years older evokes sexual ideas which were absent in the book, though.

However, it's never clarified that Siss was a vivacious, bossy girl before Unn walked into her life. Siss' misery begins right from the first scene, which is kind of irritating because Siss was a proactive carefree girl. The role of her school friends in what I interpreted as the 'shattering of the ice palace' was not brought out. Siss and Unn are duals of each other in the book. At one point during the search, a man mistakes Siss for Unn. This lovely detail is left out in the movie. Oh well. The popular girl is devastated by the disappearance of the other girl and essentially takes on her personality as a form of grieving. She abandons her old friends and stands against the wall at recess. Her teacher, her parents and the deceased girl’s aunt all try in various ways to help her out of this depression: a kind of emotional ice palace. I loved the descriptions of the changing of the season in a small Scandinavian town and the use of the frozen waterfall as something monstrous, profound, beautiful but inanimate. This is the way I felt about the book as well. Inanimate.....too cold to allow near my warm heart. I was not moved nor did I believe what is happening. I did not believe in the thought processes of Siss. I did not believe in her grieving. It was lovely art-house but not flesh and blood emotional processing. I did not believe in the children. I did not believe in the adults. I did not believe in the thinking or the dialogue. I did not in the end, believe in this book or the author's vision. I read for a bit with a shoulder shrug but then I heard the words spoken out loud. Strange, it sounded much like my voice. Not my aloud but my inner voice. Swept suddenly along not an ice floe to grab onto I was within the story. Siss is eleven years old and the most popular girl in her school. An only child, she is also the center of her parents' attention. One day her feelings toward everyone around her change when a new girl named Unn joins Siss' class at school. A lonely girl by nature, Unn is ignored by everyone in the class, except Siss. The girls decide to meet at Unn's house after school on one darkening autumn evening and commence on an electric friendship. Unn reveals to Siss that her mother died of an illness six months earlier and that even at eleven years old she does not know who her father is. Coping with these feelings swirling inside of her, Unn has yet to openly discuss her station in life with anyone, that is except for Siss. Despite being the leader of everyone at school, Siss is at heart lonely as well. It seems divinely ordained that the two girls have been brought together, and now they share a deep secret that not even Unn's Aunt or Siss' parents are privileged to know. Together, the girls appear to be on the cusp of navigating through their teenage years without much angst.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. Tarjei Versaas was a runner up for the 1964 Nobel Prize for his work on this hauntingly beautiful novel. When I think of an ice palace, the first thing that comes to mind is Elsa's creation in the Disney version of Hans Christen Andersen's Elsa the Snow Queen. Elsa's construction designed as a boundary between herself and the world, and Versaas' ice palace is similar both physically and emotionally. His prose in describing the ice is chilling yet full of beauty, which is the image I see with the untarnished snow on the ground before me. I had never read one of Versaas' novels before, and The Ice Palace is a poignant introduction to his work, which also includes the 1952 award winning The Winds. An ode to Norwegian nature and adolescent friendship, Versaas' work is one that will stay with me for a long while.