The Ice Palace (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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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: 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: Like the other children Siss is curious about the new girl, and she feels a sort of connexion to her. 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).

With the coming of spring, the river melts and the Ice Palace, too, crumbles and disappears one night, along with Unn’s secret: “Now the palace, with all its secrets, goes into the waterfall. There is a violent struggle and then it has gone.” Siss worries that no one is thinking about Unn anymore, but her mother tells her that she is the one who can think about Unn all the time. Siss feels as if she has been “given a great gift,” and is able to move on to adolescence and towards adulthood. You can’t bind yourself to her memory, and shut yourself away from what is natural for you. You would only be a bother to yourself and to others, and no one will thank you for it, far from it. You’re already making your parents unhappy". I guess I will be in the minority in giving this novel a ‘3’ when it is highly rated on GR. In addition, this novel from 1963 is considered a classic of Norwegian literature. It won the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for the best novel that year. In my edition Doris Lessing wrote a blurb praising the lyrical writing.This room seemed to be made for shouting in, if you had someting to shout about, a wild shout about companionship and comfort. 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.

In the last room, she suddenly, mysteriously, can't find a way out, not even how she came in. But in any case: The simple, repetitive language of the novel underscores this -- as it does the sense of the unsayable.

The tone of the story becomes uncomfortable with the train journey through the night. Sally Carrol is immediately at odds with her new environment. The contrast between the Bellamy’s library and Sally Carrol’s recollection of the Harper’s library serves to illustrate further the differences between the Southern and Northern culture. The Bellamy library is “simply a room with a lot of fairly expensive things in it that all looked about fifteen years old.” Sally Carrol is used to medical-books, “oil paintings of her three great-uncles” and an “old couch that had been mended up for forty-five years and was still luxurious.” It is clearly a sensitive point for Harry, as he crudely advises her against making “unfortunate” comments about family histories, as he lives in “a three generation town.” This is a sublime piece of art which masterfully portrays the intensity of new discovered feelings peaking at an early age and the necessity to merge the opposing forces involved in the process of growing up to become a whole being, and also to accept emptiness and loss as facets of life, even if that means getting rid of a part of oneself. Trata muchos temas, pero sobre todo se centra en el duelo, en la pérdida que ahoga, la negación a aceptar lo sucedido y el valor de las promesas dichas. Explora con brillantez los sentimientos de la protagonista: el temor de fallar, de no permitir el paso al olvido y la incapacidad de seguir adelante sin esa persona. Relata un encuentro entre almas gemelas que se ven unidas por una extraña pero sincera conexión que deriva en una amistad inolvidable.