The Ice Palace (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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My daughters favorite part was the fire show and the sleigh rides (shes a big horse lover) My husband and I enjoyed all of it and watching the kids have a blast with it all!

Coping with these feelings swirling inside of her, Unn has yet to openly discuss her station in life with anyone, that is except for Siss. Unn is an orphan with an unknown runaway father and has recently lost her mother to illness, now living with an elderly aunt. 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.

This room seemed to be made for shouting in, if you had someting to shout about, a wild shout about companionship and comfort. Sie tun es, beobachten sich gegenseitig, und Siss fühlt, dass etwas zwischen ihnen unausgesprochen und unerfüllt geblieben ist. To appreciate the The Ice Palace audiobook (which was the way I got to know the book) is I feel not the best format to enjoy the writing, which has poem-like section interspersed into it. 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.

Eisschlösser sind in dieser Region in kalten Wintern normal, wenn das Wasser an Wasserfällen zu riesigen Strukturen gefriert. Both girls pass a restless night and Unn decides, the following morning, that she can't quite face Siss that day, and makes a plan to go down to see the rumored spectacle of the ice palace, knowing that she'll have the solitude she needs to clear her mind. 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.

This notion can shed light into Vesaas's insistence on not naming or expressing what is Unn's secret, creating a negative space where nothing can be said about a nonexistent condition, similar to darkness being the absence of light.

Im Großen und Ganzen hat Vesaas hier einen innovativen, introspektiven Roman geschaffen, der mich auf vielen Ebenen überzeugen konnte, auch wenn die Charaktere für mich nicht immer greifbar waren. Siss' new friendship is not meant to be and, through a despondent winter, she grieves in her solitude.

Si le sumamos además una ambientación invernal en Noruega, con la que el autor logra traspasar el frío gélido de sus páginas al lector, hace que esta sea una lectura en conjunto fascinante. Contains the three novels Kimen, Fuglane and Is-slottet as well as selected short stories and poems. 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. The movie is quite old, so understandably there is a different rhythm and sense of drama than what I imagine a current day movie would have. Up to this day when people review "The Ice Palace" seem reluctant to address such issues due to a fear of sexualising the eleven-year-old main characters, two girls, Siss and Unn.