The Ice Palace (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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This book is a set in a country with long dark and cold winters and Starjik The Winter King travels across the land during winter taking children from their beds at night. No one who has set out on a rescue before has ever been seen alive again. Here we follow the adventure of the boy Ivan as he attempts to rescue his younger brother who has been kidnapped by Starjik. The visit is one of awkwardness and revelation, a sort of sounding each other out and fumbling about, but both clearly see it as friendship being established here, as two soul-mates who have found each other -- even as they're still tripping over their own insecurities. This room seemed to be made for shouting in, if you had someting to shout about, a wild shout about companionship and comfort. The Ice Palace is a fantastic story about Ivan's land, a land where children are taken by 'Starjik' the wizard. The story begins with Ivan, a brave young boy, who heads into the forest to find his missing brother. On his journey he is faced with an array of events. In the end Ivan warmed Starjik's heart and all of the missing children returned home. The ice construction rises above them, enigmatic, powerful, its pinnacles disappearing into the darkness and the winter cloud drift. It seems prepared to stand eternally… There is something secret here. They bring out what sorrows they may have and transfer them to this midnight play of light and suspicion of death… The men are lost in the game at the ice palace. They seem possessed, searching feverishly for something precious that has come to grief, yet involved themselves. They are tired, grave men, giving themselves over as sacrifices to an enchantment, saying: It is here. They stand at the foot of the ice walls with tense faces, ready to break into a song of mourning before the closed, compelling palace.”

How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary. Doris Lessing, IndependentBut whereas Sally Carrol’s headstones mark where the dead lie peacefully at rest (another nod to the ‘sleepiness’ of the South), the underground caverns of the ice palace have the potential to disturb the dead, as the ghostly appearance of Margery Lee suggests. However, it's never clarified that Siss was a vivacious, bossy girl before Unn walked into her life. Siss' misery begins right from the first scene, which is kind of irritating because Siss was a proactive carefree girl. The role of her school friends in what I interpreted as the 'shattering of the ice palace' was not brought out. Siss and Unn are duals of each other in the book. At one point during the search, a man mistakes Siss for Unn. This lovely detail is left out in the movie. Oh well. Unn does not want to feel embarrassed when meeting Siss the next day, so she decides to skip school and instead goes to see the ice castle that has been created by a nearby waterfall. Ice castles are normal in cold winters, when the water freezes into huge structures around waterfalls. Unn climbs into this ice castle, exploring the rooms baffled by its beauty. In the 7th room she gets disoriented and cannot find her way out. She dies of hypothermia. Her last word is "Siss". Das Eissschloss ist ein hochspannender Roman, der vor allem durch seine klare, fast schon kühle Sprache besticht. Vesaas ist kein Mann vieler oder großer Worte. Sein deskriptiver Stil ist präzise und immersiv. Die Art, wie er Landschaften und vor allem den Winter beschreibt, lässt einen sofort in besagte Szenerie eintauchen. Es wäre sicherlich ein Genuss, ihm im Original zu lesen.

The Ice Palace’ is a short story by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1920. The story is about a southern belle who becomes engaged to a man from the North; however, she almost freezes to death in an ice palace at a winter carnival and this leads her to rethink the engagement. 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. When a few dotted lines can cuff my heart into a promise and bind my palms over it in sombre armory, keep me lain in its pristine shadows for hours and yet freeze the time in crystalline imagery, I beam at the prospect: the prospect of living in that promise; that promise which lights up with the chandeliers of frosty realizations hanging from the ceiling of dreams and a sea of incomplete chances freezing my being. 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. . .

Unn does not return and, for the next few days, the whole village is out searching for her. They go to the falls, but find no sign of her. Siss is bereft with feelings of loss and guilt. She shuts out everyone: her parents, her teacher and her schoolfriends. It is as if she is trapped within her own ice palace. Her friends try to reach out to her, but she turns away from them. In the school yard Siss refuses to join in with their games but just stands, silently where Unn once stood. Yet this simple story has touched me deeply with its eerie beauty, its sadness and especially with the things left unsaid, unexplained: the silences, the unfinished gestures, the loneliness, the indifference and the mystery of winter landscape to the incursions of the human intruders upon its domain. When four eyes full of gleams and radiance beneath their lashes, filling the looking glass, shine into each other, words become redundant. A disturbing meeting, charged with powerful silences and unsaid secrets, unites the girls beyond humane nature in an unbreakable bond, frozen in time. 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.

Vesaas might have viewed life as gossamer of renewed promises but never without one; much like the Ice Palace that stood subdued in summer, embracing dissolution but tirelessly raising its head again in winter without exception. Vesaas must have experienced the tingling calmness that a battered palm transfers upon touching a healthy skin; much like how a tumultuous, windy evening of tight-lipped conversation can be the analgesic for months of revitalizing discoveries. Vesaas must have witnessed a beautiful painting becoming priceless with a careless but feisty stroke of brush; much like the reinstating zephyr of souls, that with or without their presence, turn daily life, aromatic. 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. And, it is just at this part in this strange little novel that this reader sat up really straight in her chair and mumbled holy shit. . .It's been an unusually cold autumn and an unlikely ice palace of epic proportions has formed from a frozen waterfall, and the dark and the cold have dominated the villagers' minds. The Ice Palace ( Nynorsk: Is-slottet) is a novel by the Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas, first published in 1963. It has been translated to English by Peter Owen Publishers, London, and was scheduled for reissue with them in Christmas of 2017 in their Cased Classics series. [ citation needed] Vesaas received The Nordic Council's Literature Prize for the novel in 1964. [1] Plot [ edit ] A story told through the eyes of an eleven year old girl and the guilt and trauma seemingly small events bring with them. Rich in metaphors and suggestions, this book left me rather cold I would have to recommend this movie for at least a watch once if you are able, I did and in a way I enjoyed it, however I don't think I will ever get around to watching it again.

We know the story is focused on two 11-year-old girls before we begin reading. One girl is new to school. She has just moved to the village to live with her aunt after the death of her unmarried mother. She shuns interaction with her schoolmates, even standing by herself along a wall at recess.Parts of the novel are difficult to read, as Vesaas leads his young character down a road of no return, but it is a remarkably powerful evocation of the human condition.