The Ice Palace

The Ice Palace is a novel by Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas that was published in 1963. It is a very short, seemingly simple story, written as if for children but very much for adults. I can't say I liked it, but I was intrigued by it.

The story concerns two girls: Siss and Unn. Unn is new to the school where Siss goes, and the two girls have a kind of mysterious bond. Siss goes over to Unn's house, where she lives with her aunt. Their connection is almost magical, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the girls are about eleven, that time when they are on the cusp of pubescence. Unn suggests that she and Siss take off all their clothes, and though is there nothing carnal about it, even this innocent moment is electrically charged, as if some kind of exchange of souls was going on.

Siss is very happy to have made a new friend. But the next day Unn goes missing (we learn how she does--I think it might have been more interesting to have this chapter at the very end). Siss, even though she only spent one night with Unn, is distraught. She refuses to tell everyone what Unn said that night, though it might help find her. She keeps referring to a "promise." She does help the search teams, though, which include going to a place whence the title comes from, the Ice Palace:

"There was a waterfall some distance away that had built up an extraordinary mountain of ice around it during the long, hard period of cold. It was said to look like a palace, and nobody could remember it happening before."

Siss enters a depression, withdrawing from other schoolmates. The prose, while spare, is pumped full of meaning, sometimes too much so: "The bird, slicing up the desolate moors into shreds and spirals, was death."

Siss visits the ice palace and once imagines she sees Unn's face there. Later, she and her school friends visit as spring approaches:

"Bang! It exploded beneath them, in the foundations: an explosion of a blow or whatever it resembled. It might have been a hammer blow on a clock that needed one in order to strike. But it was a crack, a crack with destruction in the sound. In the impossible tension in which it stood, the ice palace had split apart somewhere. It was the warning of death."

Again, Vesaas points out his death metaphor. I think, though, the the palace, which harbors a secret that is known to the reader but no one else, is a also a metaphor for the girls' innocence. It has arrived unexpectedly, and when it departs will take away the special friendship of the girls.

The Ice Palace is a quick read, but I found it a bit stodgy and pretentious. Of course, this could be the translation, or it could be the Norwegian mind set. It is pretty cold there most of the time, and ice palaces may just be a state of mind.