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The more I like a book, the more I hesitate about how to write it up in a review, about how to capture its beauty and how to convince other readers that it is worth checking up. I read The Ice Palace in one sitting, then I sat and thought about it for a week. At first glance, it is such a simple, straight-forward story, told in understated, minimalist prose. Two young girls meet after school and believe they could become close friends, yet they shy away from giving in to their impulses too fast, too easy. The next day, one of the girls goes missing, and the other feels guilty, abandoned. All events are circling around and coming back to a frozen waterfall near their small town in a mountainous district of Norway.

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.

Warning: may contain spoilers!

Siss and Unn are eleven years old and as different from each other as fire and water. Siss is lively and outspoken and even a little bossy with her friends. Unn is introverted and reticent, sitting alone at the edge of the playground. Siss comes from a content and comfortable family, with parents who give her a lot of leeway to express herself. Unn is an orphan with an unknown runaway father and has recently lost her mother to illness, now living with an elderly aunt. Yet from the first time their eyes meet across a schoolyard they feel connected. Too young and inexperienced to know how to express their feelings, shy and yet filled with yearning. Naked flames of innocence and enthusiasm, they shed their clothes and danced around each other, coming very close then jumping away in fright at the intensity of the feeling. Vesaas the poet knows how to go beyond mere words to capture the moment, in the first of a couple of lyrical passages that mark the high points of the story for me:

Gleams and radiance,
gleaming 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.
These pouting lips of yours,
no, they're mine, how alike.
Hair done the same way,
and gleams and radiance.
It's ourselves!
We can do nothing about it,
it's as if it comes from another world.
The picture begins to waver,
flows out to the edges,
collects itself, no it doesn't.
It's a mouth smiling.
A mouth from another world.
No it isn't a mouth, it isn't a smile,
nobody knows what it is -
it's only eyelashes open wide
above gleams and radiance.

After their first tentative meeting, Unn decides to play truant from school, in order to avoid embarassing her new friend, and goes to visit the frozen waterfall near the town. We will return to this ice construction several times more in the novel, during the day, at night by lanternlight, under snow and finally in spring to witness its eventual collapse. 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. Caught in the middle of this "home of the cold" , unable to find her her way back to her friend, the final image I retained of the girl Unn is in one of the translucid ice chambers:

This room seemed to be made for shouting in, if you had someting to shout about, a wild shout about companionship and comfort.

I wanted so much to be able to reach out and hold my hand out to Unn, bring her back to sunshine and to the warmth of a roaring hearth fire, to bring her and Siss back together and to watch their instinctive attraction develop into a lifelong friendship. But Siss is left to deal with the aftermath on her own, struggling to cope with remorse and guilt, trying to keep true to the memories of her missing almost friend. Here's were the second poem I've bookmarked fits in:

As we stand the snow fell thicker.
Your sleeve turns white.
My sleeve turns white.
They move between us like
Snow covered bridges.

But snow covered bridges are frozen.
In here is living warmth.
Your arm is warm beneath the snow
And a welcome weight on mine.

It snows and snows upon silent bridges.
Bridges unknown to all.

The sad overtones of the novel are tempered in part by the majestic beauty of the country (Telemark in Norway, a place that until now I associated only with a WWII commando movie) and a musical theme introduced in the last chapters, announcing the coming of spring to the tune"woodwind players". I am thinking of Grieg and Sibelius as the most appropriate composers for a soundtrack of the story, the romantic musicians that have been so strongly associated with national spirit in Scandinavia. In a similar way, Tarjei Vesaas is now a symbol of the Nordic spirit for me. Comparisons between him and the taciturn and sombre Ingmar Bergman don't seem forced at all after being exposed to the silences and mysteries of the palace of ice. I'm thinking of Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring) in particular, because it has a similar theme of innocence destroyed in the middle of a beautiful and indifferent landscape.

I have to thank a couple of Goodread friends (again) for bringing this frozen gem of a story to my attention.