The Ice Palace (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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T)he cool, lucid language of Elizabeth Rokkan's English version allows the complex edifice of Vesaas's symbolism to shine out from the prose with a clarity, even a pragmatism, that is both startling and profound. (...) The Ice Palace is an elegant poetic fable that expresses through its unique language an instinctive, rather than an intellectual, human connection with questions of isolation and schism. Its modernist preoccupations are profoundly disquieting, and yet it comforts the reader because, paradoxically, its message connects us. Our isolation is what we have in common, and the existential questions posed by Vesaas are, by definition, the province of everyone; this is a triumphant study in the reality of human anguish." - Matthew Bradley, Times Literary Supplement

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: The Ice Palace / translated by Elizabeth Rokkan. - New ed. - London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1993. - 176 pp. - ISBN 0-7206-0881-3 (hardcover) I say again, you must feel you are freed. It’s not right for you to go on as you are. It’s not like you. You’re a different person".You can’t help but feel the wind chill hit hard. Real hard. The Norwegian arthouse drama “ICE PALACE” (“IS-SLOTTET”) is a touching, gutting, unworldly and extremely candid tale of friendship and loneliness, caused by sexual awakening, forbidden feelings and guilt-ridden grief between two twelve-year-old girls in a remote mountain community in the 1930s. Es curioso, porque me costó ensamblar todas las piezas y la historia no hizo "clic" en mi cabeza hasta la tercera parte. Es entonces cuando comprendí lo del espejo y... todo, en general. Son la misma niña. No literalmente, pero sí literariamente. Solo que una lo supera, mientras que la otra no lo hizo. 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? After several days of remaining silent, Unn approaches Siss and invites her to visit her at her auntie’s house after school. Both of them seem to feel the need to talk. After chatting briefly with Auntie, the girls go up to Unn’s room. They say very little, each of them unsure what to say, but they tacitly agree that there is a bond between. A strange, mystical atmosphere seems to hold them in thrall. Unn talks about her auntie, her mother and the father she has never met; all she knows is that he was handsome and had a car. At Unn’s suggestion, they gaze at a mirror together. Something seems to fill all their senses:

They let the mirror fall, looked at each other with flushed faces, stunned. They shone towards each other, were one with each other; it was an incredible moment. There's a stunning erotic charge to the narrative here, too, as the small body squeezes through the wet fissures as Unn makes her way deeper and deeper into this glassy labyrinth: "now she managed it, slender and supple as she was, when she pushed hard enough", etc. Now first things first. There is a recurring theme in Vesaas's book about outsiders that appear in people's lives, causing mental, emotional, psychological turbulence. Many of his stories depict the struggle to restore things in their previous state of normalcy. No one can witness the fall of the ice palace. It takes place at night, after all the children are in bed.”Sex is buried deep at the bottom of this story: the girls are still innocents, only vaguely sensing that there is much that is still beyond their comprehension -- and that is still unspeakable -- and The Ice Palace is also about that attempt to preserve (in pure ice ...) childish innocence.

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: 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.

It was an enchanted palace, She must try to find a way in! It was bound to be full of curious passages and doorways – and she must get in. It looked so extraordinary that Unn forgot everything else as she stood in front of it. She was aware of nothing but her desire to enter. Nineteen-year-old Sally Carrol Happer lives in the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia. Although the local men are good friends with her and one in particular, named Clark Darrow, wants to marry her, she is engaged to Harry Bellamy, a man from an unspecified part of the northern United States. 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. Now that the station has been secured as a holding of SubLight Salvage, Lilya Hagen will be interested in an update. She can be found in SubLight Headquarters on the Groundbreaker.

Many years ago (decades even) I watched this movie on television about the life of American poet Maya Angelou. The details of the story have long ebbed away but there’s this one scene that I recall vividly. In it a sort of teacher figure is telling the young Maya about how beautiful words can be, how wonderful it is to love them. I guess this conversation remained with me because at the time I didn’t understand it. I loved reading books already, I loved the stories they told and the adventures I could vicariously experience but words in themselves? That didn’t make sense to me yet. Over the years I have come to know differently. I’ve learned to read and love poetry, to read it aloud and enjoy the resonance of words painstakingly chosen. I now know that words can be used to evoke happiness or heartbreak, fear or foreboding, they can create sounds and even music for those that can hear it. And they can be used to build otherworldly palaces made of ice of a beauty that is both extraordinary and deadly: There is nothing childlike in this deceivingly simple tale, nothing soft or tender. The spell-binding description of a perpetually glacial scenery, where twigs weep iced drops and icicles melt in pools of tears, is as distressingly beautiful as it is ruthless and brutally cold, devoid of life. Sometimes, when you lose someone, the loss is so bewildering and heavy, you have to decide whether to break off a part of yourself in letting them go, or be pulled under with them. 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. 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.Também senti muito a morte da Unn, principalmente por me identificar demais com ela. Aquela parte que aparece o rosto dela congelado e depois corta pra Siss na banheira vai ficar comigo pra sempre. The Ice Palace / translated by Elizabeth Rokkan. - First edition of first English translation. - London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1966. - 176 pp. (hardcover)