They were still dragging the river, downwards from the waterfall where there were pools. The ice-coated dragging poles stood in the snowdrifts at night, pointing upwards.All roads led to Auntie’s house. Everything collected there, all lines of communication met in this lonely woman, Unn’s sole anchor. The blind lanes crossed there at a clear, tearless point of intersection.‘I see,’ said Auntie.‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘It can’t be helped.’Unn’s anchor in life.What is the time it takes from when you begin in company and the scurrying noises on the floor kind of inkling that they are impaired in some way? Maybe you thought they could walk the same as you, see what you see, hear your tree falling in the woods because they were there with you. I lost my body/soul/heart mass since on The Ice Palace. I don’t know how much. I’m looking back from under my increasingly normal weight of under the water. I was trying too hard to feel what I would have felt in another me. My highest esteemed reads these days are less wholehearted personal connections with air to breathe inside, and more the desperate howl of a miserable dog who recognizes what’s wanting, can taste the scent of blood to be spilled. Vesaas’ The Birds spoke to the part of me that would give anything to have what the man-child Mattis could never achieve. I know it isn't true because I remember feeling the bittersweet smile when the lies take off the ground. That's what I miss, the time there's another truth inside the fantasy lie. I saw them and I lived in his book. To be whole as much as everyone else (I know that it isn’t true that “everyone else” has this and knowing this doesn’t happen at the same time as getting through another day of hoping no one else notices, to not damn functionality all to hell). I’m suspicious of what this “everyone else” is supposed to be. On the side of being the one with something missing I don’t have the slightest idea how to get it. Damn you Vesaas but The Ice Palace moved to the land of unknowable everyone else and I am citizen I have something missing and I don’t even know what it is (here’s to hoping no sicko added “Ask me how!” to the bottom of the nametag). Unn’s Auntie can give Siss permission on behalf of her niece to give up the unspoken promise to replace her life. When Siss steps closer to this what someone else says is true. When Siss says to herself can it be? When Siss can say yes it can. I wouldn't have believed either one. If she lives as the dead girl's shadow by the wall or if she gets up not from a helping hand (it could have been. I don't know if this is my part missing). If she was too tired to live as a person who says I am in love so they go on living day after day saying I am in love and how long would it take for you to notice that there's a hole? Is there any way of knowing? I can say she is too tired to keep to a promise she made when she didn't know where Unn's body was in the melting tear drop palace. I promise I will stay true to the love that was only so good as it was never said.I fell in love with a girl and she sat in the desk that remains empty until all of the good people who you know mean good because these are good people let in another girl, a real girl, not Unn's shadow and missing Siss. I fell in love away from the land where I was raised and where we all breathed together, making angels in the snow of class recess and follow the leader. Siss and Unn fell in love because they don't have to call it love. It is true because it cannot be a lie if they don't know what it is. She goes to her house, finally, after school. I wasn't in love with Siss who is in love with Unn who makes the rules because she stays by the wall. Let's, let's, let's and girlish secrets fading out into fading memories when days fall on like more snow. Unn's Auntie is on the horizon of lost girl secrets and I was not on the side of girlish secrets. When can Siss tell she isn't either? Don't say a word it is ruined if you say a word. Siss waits for the magic to happen. If she was a girl who thought very hard about what made her sad so she could cry until she felt sick on the bed. Unn runs away to the land of I threw myself into the frozen waterfall. I threw myself into the ice palace and I cried very hard until the tears stopped and you know how you feel sick when you've cried and you've wasted what made you really feel because you only wanted to cry. Unn's body is frozen and she becomes the wasted thought you only wanted so you could cry. Or was it to be in love. What would have happened if Unn with her don't speak you'll ruin it hopes had anywhere to go. I don't see anywhere else for it to go.When is Siss going to come back to us? Tell yourself you promised. Tell yourself you are keeping vigil for when she returned. What do the days look like on the other side where you used to play with the other kids? If I could have missed the other kids but she already was their born leader. Come back to us. Daughter to go home. Everyone cares, form a search party, did anyone care as much as you did Siss? How do you know who cares more, Siss? Was home alone in Unn's bedroom with the picture albums of it is only so good as long as it is a secret? Dead people in photographs. I wouldn't know who was related to who. I remember the all important girlhood friendships. I couldn't make them mad. I wasn't allowed the junk food and that was a major detriment to possible popularity. When did it stop being important? It had to have stopped being important. I should be able to believe that Siss gave up at some time on this promise to save Unn's spot. Auntie gives her the permission because who else could? I can't think of anything wrong with this and yet I can't remember how to do the inside shift when you can let go. I probably didn't love Unn to begin with. She says let's take off our clothes. They are childhood secrets and let's forget about the world we are used to and hold our breaths just to see if we could. I would have found her to be a tyrant in her bedroom with her mysterious dead mother and missing father. You aren't allowed to ask me about this. What are secret notes passed under the desk and what does it look like in the world that's just for you, like this? I don't remember what it looks like. Mother and father are worried about you. There are rules and there are white skies above of questions.There are questions about the secret. Does Siss know anything about what happened to Unn. The adults, the search party. The town is the search party. The kids whisper. What was before turns into that and then it is back to what it was, town and kids. When does Siss turn back into what she was into? How was she what she was? The little girl in the bed without their questions over her head of what she knew. When the white memories were noises and then snow on the tv when more days blur them out. When do you become what you are and how does that turn into the shift that Auntie can tell you you can be who you were again? How could Siss be so important when all she was was a secret that was good when it couldn't be spoken, ruined when it was? So how do you spend time with people, when is the time enough to be a life and when do you know it is missing? They wanted Siss back. What was in her that Unn had to be the secret? I don't know what to do with either Siss as Unn or Siss as Siss that was born. I feel cold about not knowing and it has been bothering me that I don't know. I want to feel something that is specific to Siss. What does she want? To give up the struggle and be born Siss? But who is Siss, who are the town and the kids and who was Unn? I follow Unn's Shadow by the wall and I stare and I wish the drowning feeling would disappear and it would be a life but a life you feel, not other shadows made from structures of unmovable because it's born. I probably do know this struggle it's the I'm not struggling because I gave up to smother. It is the blanket of despair, like cold you no longer feel as cold past freezing. But I was drowned before I got there and I was drowning when I realized I was talking to these girls who had the part missing of knowing why the hell they were doing this to begin with. I want to see the family and the people in the town and play and feel free because you want to. When does the shift happen so you can know what it felt like again? If Auntie can take it away what does the helping hand look like? Is the burden lifted because you felt close or was it another form of being too tired to cry? Was she just born that way, to cry like this, to will herself to be a shadow? I wish I felt it as I knew her, not someone to talk to myself about in a this is how it happens and this was the part and it added up to that part. How long do I gotta talk to myself before it stops doing that?
[4.5] Two thirds of this were perfect. The grumpiest book blogger I've read describes Vesaas as a "writer of incredibly beautiful simple poetic prose. You know, the kind of stuff that every literary writer is supposed to write (according to reviews) but which none of them actually do. Well, Vesaas actually does." Immaculately honed crystal. Elizabeth Rokkan's 1964 translation has the charm of being from the same time as the book (published in Norwegian the previous year), peppered with a few UK English idioms, especially in the way the children talk to one another. It feels like the same world as British books of c.50 years ago, yet also appropriately far away from them. Knowing of the divide in recent Norwegian history and culture between pre-oil and afterwards, this small rural story seems a perfect example of the former. (Something contemporary which harks back to that world, like Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses has a comfort and awareness of consumer trappings which are simply absent here.)There must be great potential for symbolism in this little book, but it was the story itself which elicited the strongest response from me.There are some books it's surprising so many other people like because they address some attribute or taste which it seems as if huge numbers of other people don't have. It was only after joining GR that I was aware of what a popular behemoth my teenage favourite The Secret History actually is. I think The Ice Palace is loved by many simply for its literary qualities. But I have never, by a long way, read anything better about when you know at first sight that you really like someone. Love at first sight is well enough documented, but my experience is that with a handful of people you just know on sight and lust may or may not be a part of that. By having Siss and soon-lost Unn so awkward with one another in conversation, yet so sure of their bond, standing on the verge of some revelation Unn doesn't feel ready to say (and which might not even be a big deal to anyone else) he captures something so much harder to sum up than if they had instantly talked nineteen to the dozen. An idea that people have some ineffable essence. 'Unn's tend to be somewhat elusive and that's probably part of their magic. They remain special as memories even when they've rarely been in touch for years, or in one case, I decided to stop speaking to one because of certain clashes; but that essence means they are emotionally more important than many people I've spent more time with. I think the internet era has given this sort of thing a bad name, as creepy, because certain popular imaginations equate cherishing a memory with bothering people or looking constantly at their Facebook page - and think that the memory of someone can never have the same sepia beauty as it did before social media. (But it can, if you or they don't use it, or you simply never go into their orbit.) Even missing the dead for very long seems to be frowned on to some extent. And some younger commenters appear to back-project this set of assumptions. Siss' sorrow for Unn is just the sort that seems unfairly taboo, because she hadn't known her for long, which can be taken as the only correct measure of meaning and importance (besides, it's not as if she's doing anyone any harm).A little less is also more in Vesaas' descriptions of landscape. These snow and ice scenes are exquisite, but never baroque and overdone as can easily happen (e.g. the bits I've read of Jón Kalman Stefánsson's highly praised writing.) It is very odd to marvel at the beauty of the writing and scenery when you know awfulness is going to befall a character who personifies something so treasured.The people around Siss are far less harsh than they would surely be in a British novel of this time: they are very person-centred , and it is heartwarming that after the first few days they don't press her too much about Unn and that she gets to keep the secret which as yet had no substance, as the adults have accepted it's nothing to do with where Unn went.SPOILER, ALTHOUGH IT ISN'T REALLY THAT KIND OF BOOK.The last third develops in too self-helpy a way - crashing disappointment because the earlier part of the book was so lovely. It goes rather into a mode of pull-socks-up, now it's time to move on because we say so, with Siss going along with it, rather in contrast to the way people treated her before. I would have liked to see this happen more organically, where Siss of her own accord participates incrementally more in the other things of life - she would because she's clearly a resilient, outgoing kid at heart - and can enjoy them again. Where is still a little corner for Unn, who doesn't have to be entirely forgotten, even if it is no longer the era of the Promise in deepest snow from Siss to Unn (p.96), to think about her constantly; from time to time, and even when she has grown up, the memory of this friend still occurs from time to time.More prosaically, I wonder about the name Tarjei Vesaas. It looks Finnish, not Norwegian, to me - but bios of the writer don't mention it, and my knowledge is limited (though at least now, thanks to Babbel, I can distinguish between Swedish, Danish and Norwegian in films) and I have noticed a few Norwegian names that look Finnish-ish, in cast lists and so forth.
Do You like book The Ice Palace (2002)?
The more I like a book, the more I hesitate about how to write it up in a review, about how to capture its beauty and how to convince other readers that it is worth checking up. I read The Ice Palace in one sitting, then I sat and thought about it for a week. At first glance, it is such a simple, straight-forward story, told in understated, minimalist prose. Two young girls meet after school and believe they could become close friends, yet they shy away from giving in to their impulses too fast, too easy. The next day, one of the girls goes missing, and the other feels guilty, abandoned. All events are circling around and coming back to a frozen waterfall near their small town in a mountainous district of Norway.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.Warning: may contain spoilers!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: Gleams and radiance,gleaming from me to you,and from me to you alone - into the mirror and out again,and never an answer about what this is,never an explanation.These pouting lips of yours,no, they're mine, how alike.Hair done the same way,and gleams and radiance.It's ourselves!We can do nothing about it,it's as if it comes from another world.The picture begins to waver,flows out to the edges,collects itself, no it doesn't.It's a mouth smiling.A mouth from another world.No it isn't a mouth, it isn't a smile,nobody knows what it is - it's only eyelashes open wideabove gleams and radiance. After their first tentative meeting, Unn decides to play truant from school, in order to avoid embarassing her new friend, and goes to visit the frozen waterfall near the town. We will return to this ice construction several times more in the novel, during the day, at night by lanternlight, under snow and finally in spring to witness its eventual collapse. The beauty of the water and frost sculpted chambers is amazing, beckoning not unlike a desert mirage with refractions of light and hidden treasures, menacing and cruel at other moments with the pressures of the ice and the shifting underground torrents, closed to scrutiny and transient - the ice palace as a metaphor I translate into the ultimate answer (or the lack of an answer) to the meaning of life. Caught in the middle of this "home of the cold" , unable to find her her way back to her friend, the final image I retained of the girl Unn is in one of the translucid ice chambers: This room seemed to be made for shouting in, if you had someting to shout about, a wild shout about companionship and comfort. I wanted so much to be able to reach out and hold my hand out to Unn, bring her back to sunshine and to the warmth of a roaring hearth fire, to bring her and Siss back together and to watch their instinctive attraction develop into a lifelong friendship. But Siss is left to deal with the aftermath on her own, struggling to cope with remorse and guilt, trying to keep true to the memories of her missing almost friend. Here's were the second poem I've bookmarked fits in: As we stand the snow fell thicker.Your sleeve turns white.My sleeve turns white.They move between us likeSnow covered bridges.But snow covered bridges are frozen.In here is living warmth.Your arm is warm beneath the snowAnd a welcome weight on mine.It snows and snows upon silent bridges.Bridges unknown to all. The sad overtones of the novel are tempered in part by the majestic beauty of the country (Telemark in Norway, a place that until now I associated only with a WWII commando movie) and a musical theme introduced in the last chapters, announcing the coming of spring to the tune"woodwind players". I am thinking of Grieg and Sibelius as the most appropriate composers for a soundtrack of the story, the romantic musicians that have been so strongly associated with national spirit in Scandinavia. In a similar way, Tarjei Vesaas is now a symbol of the Nordic spirit for me. Comparisons between him and the taciturn and sombre Ingmar Bergman don't seem forced at all after being exposed to the silences and mysteries of the palace of ice. I'm thinking of Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring) in particular, because it has a similar theme of innocence destroyed in the middle of a beautiful and indifferent landscape.I have to thank a couple of Goodread friends (again) for bringing this frozen gem of a story to my attention.
—Algernon
When a few dotted lines can cuff my heart into a promise and bind my palms over it in sombre armory, keep me lain in its pristine shadows for hours and yet freeze the time in crystalline imagery, I beam at the prospect: the prospect of living in that promise; that promise which lights up with the chandeliers of frosty realizations hanging from the ceiling of dreams and a sea of incomplete chances freezing my being. A life is made of promises; some made to self, some to others. And like a diffident fuel, it comes into play when life derails to reserve. Aren’t all the promises tested at the brink of uncertainty? Aren’t all the promises repainted at the threshold of patience? Aren’t all the promises questioned at the gates of survival? What do Siss* and Unn**, all of eleven, seal during their first (and only) conversation, on a chilly evening within the warm confines of a small wooden room, occasionally interfered by murmuring winter winds and distracting snowflakes? An unspoken promise: a promise that outgrows their initial inhibitions in school, their hushed blossoming of mutual admiration, their trepid steps towards each other, their solitary evening of joint reflections, their singular moment of shocking adolescence, their crimson welcome of next day sun, their sub-consciously chosen divergent paths, their uninitiated severance of hearts and their union over terminated breath. (view spoiler)[ This promise lives on even when one of them is locked in the heart of the Ice Palace forever. (hide spoiler)]
—Seemita
I've never felt more strongly for a character in a while. I felt really sad when little Unn lost her way in the labyrinthine ice palace. When her freezing thoughts culminated into a final call for her new friend Siss, I wanted someone to come and hold her. Alas, this is literature. Siss and Unn. When this subtle fairy tale of growing up begins, they hardly know one another. They spend an evening of unsaid fantasies and disturbing silences which is so masterfully described it sets the tone for what is to follow. The ice palace is formed by a frozen waterfall. It is a majestic structure. It consumes. Then there comes the promise: “Promise in deepest snow from Siss to Unn: I promise to think about no one but you.” Some may say that the melancholic passage of time is reminiscent of Bergman, but to me this book is a soul companion to the great Spanish film: The Spirit of Beehive. Both the book and the film study how apparently insignificant things affect children in disturbing ways, opening for them unexplored vistas: a peek into the mysterious and terrifyingly beautiful reality they are not prepared to understand yet, looming in the background like a cold, indifferent ice palace as they make their passage through adolescence. And when the journey is made, when new facts are discovered, when loss is accepted as a way of life, the ice palace crumbles.
—Jigar Brahmbhatt
