The Ice Palace (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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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. This is one of the most lyrical passages in the book. But in general the author chooses ordinary everyday words and uses spare language to create this ethereal dreamworld of ice and snow with which to enchant his readers. He tells a haunting story of a budding friendship, of loss and a grief that incapacitates against the cycle of freezing winter and the thaws of spring. Greek mythology associates this cycle with the eternal struggle between life and death and though the latter will finally prove victorious when it is time, life too will claim its own victories. It seems fitting that just as with the coming of the warmer weather the gorgeous ice palace finally crumbles away our heroin’s grief also begins to thaw and life’s instincts gradually win her over. Fitzgerald’s ‘The Ice Palace’ is, first and foremost, about the differences between the North and the South in the United States, and the differing temperaments of the people who inhabit each. Whereas Sally Carrol’s South is associated with sleepiness, laziness, and warmth, Harry’s North is associated with coldness: both the coldness of the weather and the detached and even hostile attitudes of the locals. In the North, we might say, the coldness is a matter of temperament as well as temperature. 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 leaves promptly and Unn suffers pangs of doubt. Had she overshared? Did Siss feel the same way? Was she imagining their connection? 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.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.

This book, written by a non-militant bigot, is a mixture of pagan and Christian morality with a non-aggressive and yet intense bias against homosexuality, deemed as a kind of hysteria or aberration that can occur when young people, a girl, in this case, grows in an all-women environment and can be contagious, transmitted and yet cured. Unn is the newcomer in Siss's school, an orphaned girl that grew up with her single mother, never met a father, and after her mother's death came to stay with her spinster Auntie. Unn insists on distancing herself from the others and yet there is an obvious attraction between her and her schoolmate, Siss: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. Read it - Examine the ice palace on the cover of the book and the picture of a girl. Use your imagination and think of imagery and symbolism, snow, ice, water, new seasons, mental trauma, the mirror that reveals all, two eleven year old girls, an outsider and the other the leader of a group at school. The catalyst is the ice palace. There is a door on the left of the large room in front of the station entrance. Take the corridor leading downstairs to find a terminal. 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 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.