Review: 'The Ice Palace' by Tarjei Vesaas, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan
Pub. Date: 07/10/2025
Publisher: Steerforth & Pushkin Press
In rural Norway, 11-year-old Siss, socially at ease and popular among her peers, finds herself drawn to the new girl in class, Unn. Unn is shy and strange, but holds a magnetic power for her more gregarious classmate. Their friendship is cemented after a dreamy afternoon spent gazing into each other’s eyes in the mirror, exchanging hinted secrets and perhaps pieces of their souls.
But the next day, Unn, embarrassed by her new intimacy with Siss, skips school and goes to explore a series of ice caves around a nearby waterfall. Lost in the labyrinthine chambers, she eventually freezes to death, thinking of Siss as she loses feeling and drifts into the dark. When Siss learns Unn is missing and likely dead, she is determined to keep alive the memory of the friend she so briefly knew – sometimes it feels as though she too is locked in the glistening chambers of the ice palace. It is only when spring comes and the ice palace melts that Siss finds herself able to let go of Unn, and reconnect to those around her.
A profound exploration of grief, and an intensely lyrical coming-of-age story, this novel is the masterpiece of one of Norway’s greatest writers.
I studied Norwegian over the past few years and one good thing to know about the language is that there isn't just one. A whole variety of dialects exist in Norway, each of which is legitimate. There are, however, two "main" versions of Norwegian: Bokmål (litt. "book language") and Nynorsk (litt. "new Norwegian"). The majority of Norwegians speak, read, and write Bokmål or a slight alteration of it, while Nynorsk is spoken by a minority. Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970) was a Nynorsk author and poet who seemed to actively stay out of the spotlight. Karl Ove Knausgaard provides a foreword to this translation and describes how Vesaas turned down various honours and awards, preferring to remain on his farm in the isolated Telemark. In his writing, there also is a certain kind of natural quiet which threatens to bleed into loneliness and isolation. Knausgaard also notes this threat, both in The Ice Palace and Vesaas' other masterpiece, The Birds. I can also see why Knausgaard felt that those two books changed him. There is a quiet strength to the fluidity of The Ice Palace, which seeps into the reader quietly and shapes an appreciation for what Vesaas is trying to do. The book isn't straightforward, it takes mildly fantastical turns, it is both prosaic and poetic, it is stark and soft, quiet and loud, but in all that it finds a way of feeling very human.
Siss is excited, because she is on her way to visit the mysterious new girl in town, Unn. Unn's mother died recently and so she now lives with her aunt in Siss' town. She is a quiet, withdrawn girl, but there is a pull between her and Siss, one which Siss hopes will be explored this evening. Their time together is strained, though, and Vesaas fully captures that odd tension between young girls that is made up of both adoration and fear. Unn wants to reveal something, but Siss doesn't want to know yet. The next morning, Unn decides to visit the ice palace which has formed around a waterfall due to the heavy cold and frost, rather than face Siss quite yet. They'll talk tomorrow. Except that Unn goes missing and Siss finds herself somewhat trapped in promises that were never quite made. Did Unn say something? Should Siss have known? What does Siss do now? In many ways, The Ice Palace is a quiet meditation on loss, especially the loss of something that was never quite there, never quite yours. In this way, the ice palace itself is a beautiful metaphor for the interrupted friendship. It is this stark, beautiful, terrifying natural thing which will inevitably disappear in spring. It is there, visible, but can never be fully understood or taken in. Similarly, the friendship between Siss and Unn was a growing, beautiful, terrifying thing which never entirely came to fruition, disrupted too early to be fully real but nonetheless enormous in the impression it made.
Terjai Vesaas was, as noted above, a Nynorsk author and poet. As he wrote in Nynorsk, perhaps his audience wasn't quite as big as it could have been, so I am very happy that his works continue to be translated. The Ice Palace is a stunning mix between quiet and loud. Vesaas' observations of human beings, the ways they think and act, their quiet bravery and their loud love, are incredibly acute but are never delivered in a forceful way. This calmness is contrasted with the detailed sharpness of his nature writing. There is a short bit about a hawk, who keeps circling the ice palace, somehow caught by its power and now, despite all its freedom, the hawk is unable to do anything but circle it. There is a vividness to this which somehow had my heart beating faster. Similarly, his descriptions of the loud cracks of ice becoming more solid, of the frost and rime on twigs and leaves, and the ice palace itself are beautiful and strike a great balance between being precise and imaginative. I am also amazed at how well he captured the cusp of childhood into teenagedom, that growing awareness of oneself in relation to others and the fracturing of previously held beliefs about the world. Siss feels like an eleven-year old, but one who is in that moment of transition. It is perhaps only beginning, but you can see the traces of the kind of person she is going to be, even while she's still afraid of the dark. The Ice Palace is the kind of book that takes young people and their thoughts seriously and in making it so, Vesaas has created a beautiful novel about nature and humanity, about loss and love. His writing is also stunningly translated by Elizabeth Rokkan, who translated many of Vesaas works and other Norwegian books before hear death in 2016.
I give this novel...
5 Universes!
The Ice Palace is a beautiful and sharp little novel. It is beautifully written and tackles major themes of loss, love, depression, and loneliness, without every losing sight of the beauty of being alive.
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