The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Ice Palace by Tarjei VesaasMark Axelrod
Tarjei Vesaas. The Ice Palace. Trans. Elizabeth Rokkan. Peter Owen/Dufour Editions, 2002. 176 pp. Paper: $19.95.
When one thinks of Scandinavian literature, several names immediately come to mind: Ibsen, Strindberg, Hamsun. But for those who know what brilliant gems can be found in the treasury of Scandinavian literature, names like Stig Dagerman, Hjalmar Söderberg, and Tarjei Vesaas are as recognizable as North Sea herring. Though Vessas’s novel The Birds is arguably his finest, The Ice Palace is arguably his most poetic. The tale of Siss and Unn, two eleven-year-old girls living in the hinterlands of Norway, is not merely a tale of childhood friendship, but is also a subtle and palpable excursion into the innocent recesses of sexual exploration. As early as the first chapter, one senses a kind of rhythm to the prose that parallels the mood and melancholy of the novel. In chapter 3, “One Single Evening,” as Siss and Unn meet each other for the first time in Unn’s home, Vesaas writes: “Four eyes full of gleams and radiance beneath their lashes, filling the looking-glass. Questions shooting out and then hiding again. I don’t know: Gleams and radiance, gleaming from you to me, from me to you, and from me to you alone—into the mirror and out again, and never an answer about what this is, never an explanation.” The repetition is not either for the sake of repetition or hollow authorial intrusion, as one finds in Lawrence, but for poetic measure. Beyond the subtle sexual allusions, however, is a tale of two girls whose secret leads Unn into the labyrinth of the ice palace, where she dies a death steeped in poetic imagery. The yearning faith Siss has in the hopeful discovery of her friend parallels the reader’s mournful knowledge that Unn will never return. [Mark Axelrod]