The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas: book review

The Ice Palace (1963, English edition 1966, this edition 2013) is set in Norway in mid-winter.

Siss is an eleven-year-old girl on her way one evening to see Unn, a new girl at school, who lives with her aunt. Siss knows she is ‘on her way to something exciting.’

Siss and Unn look in a mirror. They are both the same age, the same height, with the same hairstyle, and the same lips. ‘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.’ It was brief moment, because Siss left abruptly.

The ice palace was a waterfall at the outlet of a geat lake that ‘had built up an extraordinary mountain of ice around it’ during the winter months. That’s where Unn went the next day, to avoid seeing Siss at school. She entered the ice forest. She disappeared.

The descriptions of the snow, ice, water, forest, and the palace evoke the extreme cold and danger – in a stark, minimalistic style of writing. ‘But the palace was dark and dead; no light came from within … The ice construction rises above them, enigmatic, powerful, its pinnacles disappearing into the darkness and the winter cloud mist.’

It is about Siss’s torment, her loss, her loneliness. Her promise. The exploration of Siss’s emotions is mesmerizing and engaging throughout this ‘edge-of-the-precipice’ book.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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