The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas

Staff review by Chris Saliba

A young girl goes missing in a palace created out of ice. 

In rural Norway eleven-year-old Siss is on the way to meet Unn, a new girl at her school. Unn is a bit mysterious, with no father and a mother who died recently. The girls go to Unn’s Auntie’s house, where they try to get to know each other. They are by turns friendly and shy. Unn says she has a secret, the details of which aren’t revealed. The girls then part ways for the day, feeling a little awkward after their first meeting.

The next day Unn decides to skip school and visit an ice palace that has been created at a nearby waterfall. The ice palace, created by the freezing temperatures working on the  splashing water, has many different cave-like rooms. Unn becomes transfixed by the beauty of the ice palace and its many strange natural forms. She steps into one of the rooms and never emerges again.

When the people of the town find out that Unn hasn’t returned, a search is instigated. Some suspicion falls on Siss, however, as everyone knows that Unn confided in her some type of secret.

Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace (1963) is essentially a mystery about an unusual, secretive young girl who goes missing. (Her disappearance has similarities to Australian novelist Joan Lindsay’s Picnic At Hanging Rock.) The other main character, besides the girls, is of course the ice palace itself. The novel describes its evolution from gushing torrents of water into a beautiful palace; the first fissures as the warmer weather comes and the palace cracks apart; and finally, its disintegration, sweeping all that came with it into the river system. Vesaas's descriptions of the natural wonders of a Norwegian winter form some of the novel's aesthetic highlights.

A gripping mood piece and a haunting ode to some of nature’s more mysterious work.

The Ice Palace, by Tarjei Vesaas. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780241321218  RRP: $22.99

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