11.02.2015

 Tarjei Vesaas: The Ice Palace
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com

There’s a common misconception that Eskimos have an inflated number of words for snow. Probably because there’s various Eskimo tribes, all speaking their own languages. I have no idea how many words there are in Norwegian - or Nynorsk, to be more precise - but I reckon there’s a good number of them, otherwise Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace (1963) would be a repetitive novel.

And how, then, without being repetitive, would it translate to English, if we only have one word for snow? That word being, well, snow. Thankfully, the English language has a large enough vocabulary to describe frozen water in all manner of ways - ice, icicle, frost, slush, etc. - all equally evocative, and its a mercy indeed for without them The Ice Palace would not be the evocative beauty it is.

Siss and Unn are two very different young girls. The former is popular in their rural school; the latter, recently arrived in the area, is very much alone. But something attracts them to one another, and one winter evening Siss heads over to Unn’s and their getting to know other - secrets shared, and promised to never tell, aside - is an awkward affair. So awkward, in fact, that Unn skips school the following day to visit the ice palace, a structure built from the errant streams and spray of a waterfall, and is never heard from again.

And as the search for Unn begins amongst the villagers the snow begins to fall. In fact, the snow falls all winter, each successive layer covering up the earth and any tracks Unn may have left. But it’s not quite so simple as that, for the snow is both physical and metaphorical, a representation of the way in which Siss becomes snowed in, emotionally isolated in her need to preserve the memory of her friend:

They’re not thinking about Unn any more.”  “Who isn’t?”  “Nobody is!” said Siss, even though she had not meant to. It had gone dark, and then she had said it.
Her mother answered calmly: “How do you know, my girl?”  Siss said nothing.
“And then nobody knew Unn. It’s unreasonable, but it makes it seem different. People have a lot to think about, you see.” Mother looked at Siss and added: “You’re the person who can think about Unn all the time.”  As if Siss had been given a great gift.

This “gift” leads Siss to embody Unn, to become the loner at school. To keep the air of mystery alive - for that reason she’ll never tell another soul Unn’s secret. But as the winter leads into spring, Siss learns to accept that Unn is never coming back and in such situations one can be relieved of a promise’s obligation. And so, with the new season warming the land, Siss is able to take one step closer to adulthood and all the inner turmoil she has been suffering melts away, the metaphorical ice palace going the same way as the physical one:

It was just as alarmingly tall and strange from whichever angle you looked at it. Polished and sparkling, free of snow, and with a ring of cold around it in the middle ofthe mild March air in which it stood. The river, black and deep, moved out from under the ice, gathering speed on its way downward and taking with it everything that could be torn way.

Aside from the rather amazing story of The Ice Palace, with its layers of symbols and possible interpretations, what really captures the imagination is the prose: chilly, sad, and haunting; yet not without colour. It’s poetry, and what makes it even more special is that it’s a translation. Just how beautiful must the original be?

The Ice Palace really deserves more widespread attention. It’s a subtle gem, extremely unassuming, and, while it will no doubt mean different things to different people, they will all agree that it means something to them. Frankly, it’s nothing short of a work of art and I’ll be looking forward to reading more of Vesaas in the near future. As an introduction to his work, what a way to break the ice!

 Tarjei Vesaas: The Ice Palace (1963)
https://sloopie72.wordpress.com
Posted by Karen Carlson on July 22, 2013
Norwegian National Ballet

A young, white forehead boring through the darkness. An eleven-year-old girl. Siss.  How does a child experience the world? The Ice Palace shows us one way an eleven-year-old girl, right on the brink of puberty without much in the way of experience or emotional vocabulary, might navigate her way through love, grief, and the unknown.

Yes, of course this is another of the works covered in the “Fiction of Relationship” class taught by Arnold Weinstein of Brown University through Coursera. He’s something of an evangelist about this book, “finding a way to include it in virtually every course that I teach” as he explains in Morning, Noon and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books (he also covers it in his book on Scandinavian literature; nothing like free access to a class taught by the guy who literally wrote the book). I can see several reasons it would fit into this particular course: the nuclear interaction between the two girls, of course; the relationship between each of them, separately and together, and Nature; and also, says none less than Doris Lessing in her Guardian book review, the relationship of the community:

The sense of mutual responsibility is so strong it is like another character in the story, as if, at any time you liked, you could appeal to some invisible council of collective decency. There are few things in literature more touching, more admirable, than the way this community of adults and children care for Siss…
~~ Doris Lessing, The Guardian book review, 4/17/93

Siss and Unn – they sound like beatbox syllables, don’t they; what struck me right off the bat was how opposite the names are. The girls are opposites, too: Siss is a known quantity, a leader in her class, outgoing, whereas Unn is the new girl, an orphan who just moved to town to live with her Auntie. She’s a bit shy and standoffish, not really interested in meshing into the social fabric of her class at school: “She had no parents, and it put her in a different light, an aura they could not quite explain….They looked at her critically and accepted her at once. There didn’t seem to be anything the matter with her. An attractive girl. Likeable. But she stayed where she was.” She refuses Siss’ overtures to join the group, with no explanation other than “I can’t.”

Norwegian National BalletHow interesting that the group accepts this. In my school, you were in trouble if you wore the wrong skirt. Maybe kids in Norway in the 60s were more accepting of different strokes. Siss: “Unn was strong in her lonely position in the schoolyard, not lost and pathetic.” Alone by choice; aloneness as independence.

Siss isn’t quite as sanguine about it, not at first; she realizes Unn has a kind of power in her solitude, and that’s what the kids respect and honor, and to her it feels like “two combatants, but it was a silent struggle….It was not even hinted at.” But this quickly gives way to a different feeling:

After a while Siss began to feel Unn’s eyes on her in class. Unn sat a couple of desks behind her, so she had plenty of opportunity. Siss felt it as a peculiar tingling in her body. She liked it so much she scarcely bothered to hide it. She pretended not to notice but felt herself to be enmeshed in something strange and pleasant. These were not searching or envious eyes; there was desire in them – when she was quick enough to meet them. There was expectancy. Unn pretended indifference as soon as they were out of doors and made no approach. But from time to time Siss would notice the sweet tingling in her body: Unn is sitting looking at me. She saw to it that she almost never met those eyes. She did not yet dare to do so – only in a few swift snatches when she forgot. But what does Unn want?

Some day she’ll tell me.
Now, don’t get your hopes up: this isn’t pornography, and it isn’t about a couple of eleven-year-old lesbians. Today we’d call it a girl-crush, a mixture of curiosity, admiration, and random eroticism focused on Unn. Siss wouldn’t have had that vocabulary, though. She just knew that she and Unn must meet. I’ve been trying to figure out some particle physics on this (I’d love some expert, or even just educated, input here) – it seems a collision between a proton and an electron can have different results, depending on the “energy.” One explanation of one possibility reads “The electron wave function (cloud) and the proton wave function overlap. That is, they both become fairly intense in the same spatial regions.” And this is exactly what happens when they do meet, and together look into a mirror:

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. Those pouting red lips of yours, no, they’re mine, how alike! Hair done in 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.

During this same meeting, Unn tells Siss she has a secret, but she never reveals what that secret is. I haven’t a clue what it might be, even whether it’s a routine kind of secret (she was angry at her mother the day she died, for instance, and feels responsible for her death) or something more supernatural (maybe she hears voices; there’s something about Unn that reads off, whether it be an emerging psychosis or a belief in a spirit world). Writer Shani Bianjiu (I loved her TNY short story, “Means of Suppressing Demonstrations” from a year ago) describes, in an NPR article, how she was particularly impressed by this aspect of the book when she read it as a child: “This book expanded my childish understanding of what a book can be and do. It showed me that not every secret needs to be revealed. Not every seed of a connection blossoms. Not every child grows up, or is freed of her demons. Not every loss or pain has a purpose, or can be put in exact words….Reading it did not make reality less fragmented and random, but it made it seem worthy, inexplicable as it may be.”

The story takes a turn here.

Norwegian National BalletThe next day, in the next chapter, Unn becomes the third-person point-of-view character and for the first (and last) time we see what’s in her head. We discover she’s as affected by Siss as Siss is by her. She skips school the next day – some combination of embarrassment and a desire to savor what’s happened – and heads to the Ice Palace, a frozen waterfall. I won’t even try to capture the scene; it’s exquisite reading as she travels from one “room” to the next, each with a different experience: the sound of roaring water, a hostile petrified forest, a sad room of tears, a green room, a small dripping room. And the cold… until it isn’t cold any more.

End Part One. Because it’s not a novel of addition, about two girls; it’s a novel about subtraction: one girl minus one girl.

What’s it like to lose someone at the very start, the incandescent start, of a relationship? What’s it like to have promised to keep a secret – not even a secret, really, just a secret that there is a secret? What’s it like to not know, to know you may never know? Now – what’s it like for an eleven-year-old to deal with all of this?

Readers of this book experience this state of uncertainty. We don’t really know what’s going on much of the time. I wasn’t sure until the very end – and I’m still not sure, in fact – if there was a supernatural or magical reality element, or if it was all the metaphor and emotion of the eleven-year-old psychic landscape.

Siss seems to “become” Unn in some ways – she becomes more standoffish at school, and another girl takes over as leader. Unn’s desk is left vacant in the classroom; when a new student joins the class, Siss defends the desk when the teacher tries to reassign it: “‘And if her place isn’t there, she’ll never come back!’ exclaimed Siss – and at that moment her wild assertion did not seem absurd. A quiver passed through them all.” I understand that. I was in a therapy group once, and after a suicide (that happens sometimes in therapy groups), the chair was left vacant until the group moved to another room. I can see how an eleven-year-old, whose friend went missing months ago, might well feel that way. In fact, I’m a little baffled that the teacher even considered giving the desk away, but that may be my own eleven-year-old speaking.

The novel moves on with the story of Siss’ healing. She visits Unn’s Auntie, who’s moving away: “I’m certain now that there’s nothing more to wait for.” Seeing Unn’s room cleaned out, talking with Auntie, who assures her she is released from her promise – these become a turning point of sorts for Siss, who, for the first time since Unn’s disappearance, plans an outing for her class – to the Ice Palace, the very symbol of faith, of love, of Unn, before the thaw brings it down.

Structurally, though certainly not stylistically, I’m reminded how Lena’s pregnancy in Light in August – the inevitable birth present from the very first page – gave that novel its overall structure and forward motion. More directly, I’m reminded of Speak, a truly wonderful contemporary YA novel by Laurie Halse Anderson which also uses the rhythm of the seasons – the school year – to trace a girl’s injury, withdrawal, and recovery. It’s quite effective, to link winter with grieving and spring with healing; it also provides a framework that gives the novel an intrinsic momentum.

I’d never heard of this novel or this author; I haven’t read any Norwegian literature besides Sophie’s World, a YA “novel of philosophy” (and don’t pick on me because I read YA novels; I learned a lot from that book, and I’m pretty impressed with what is considered YA fiction in Norway). I’m very glad I encountered it here, and I’m looking forward to the class lectures to discover all the (many many) things I missed.

 Frozen secrets stranded in a waterfall:
'The Ice Palace' - Tarjei Vesaas Tr.
Elizabeth Rokkan: Peter Owen,

Doris Lessing applaud the reissue of a classic novel about rural intensity by the Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas DORIS LESSING Saturday 17 April 1993

http://www.independent.co.uk

THE SUPERLATIVES are all worn out; we have used them too often while trying to make some good book visible among others clamouring for attention. 'Unique]' 'Unforgettable]' 'Extraordinary]' But these words are used of any old rubbish. Peter Owen says Palace of Ice is the best novel he has ever published, and that is saying a lot. Although the author was born in 1897, his books are far from old-fashioned and traditional: he experimented with new forms, was described as a modernist.

This novel won the prestigious Nordic Council Award in 1963. Tarjei Vesaas has become a classic. Coachloads of people go on pilgrimages to his old home.

It is the atmosphere, the style, that make this novel. It begins, 'A young white forehead boring into the darkness. An eleven-year-old girl. Siss. It was really only afternoon, but already dark. A hard frost in late autumn. Stars, but no moon, and no snow to give a glimmer of light . . .' But we are behind that young forehead, inside a child's world of events and encounters, ordinary enough to adults, but full of mysterious and half-understood intimations.

One little girl, the orphan Unn, has a secret, something terrible - we never know what it is - which she promises to tell her new friend Siss; but instead, the very day after the promise, she is impelled to explore the caves of a frozen waterfall, further and deeper into the shining heart of the ice.

'The new room was a miracle, it seemed to her. The light shone strong and green through the walls and the ceiling, raising her spirits after their drenching in tears.

'Of course] Suddenly she understood, now she could see it clearly: it had been herself crying so hard in there. She did not know why, but it had been herself, plunged in her own tears.' There she dies. The whole community searches for her, and some even clamber over the surface of the frozen fall, but it is only her friend Siss who catches a glimpse of her, like an apparition inside the ice palace, looking out through the ice wall.

In the spring the frozen river melts, and all is swept away in the floods, the secret too. Meanwhile, Siss is trying to make sense of what happened. We see with her, feel with her, understand why she may not tell what she knows. The irony is that she has nothing to tell, only that there is a secret. If she did break what she saw as an implicit promise to the dead girl, the adults would only say, But is that all? Yet the 'all' is terrible, it must have been, and the little girl knew it was.

This tale is like a legend. Easy to hear, as you read voices singing the lines of the ballad it could so easily be. Part of the reason for this the author did not intend, for time has taken a hand, adding a dimension of far away and long ago. Tarjei Vesaas spent his whole life in the country, and the tale is set in a community of a kind that could not exist in our brutal and ugly time. Sometimes when you read or hear about a community in the past, before it was cracked apart by aeroplanes and trains and cars and tourists and radios and television, it seems like an organism, each person with a function, a role, each playing a part. These people in their rural district are a whole, everyone knowing at all times about the others and what they are doing and feeling.

The sense of mutual responsibility is so strong it is like another character in the story, as if, at any time you liked, you could appeal to some invisible council of collective decency. There are few things in literature more touching, more admirable, than the way this community of adults and children care for Siss, a little girl frozen with shock and with grief. They understand that she needs to identify with Unn, to stand on the edge of the school playground, just as Unn did - that child who came from far away in Norway, because her mother died, to live with an aunt she hardly knows. But Unn had stood there because she was strong, to show everyone that she was, while Siss is like a pillar of ice. Slowly the child thaws, and because of the delicate, perfectly timed kindness of teachers and friends, she returns to life.

'Up on land there are slashes and scars in the river banks, upturned stones, uprooted trees and supple twigs that have been stripped of their bark. The blocks of ice tumble away pell-mell towards the lower lake and are spread out across it before anyone has woken up or seen anything. There the shattered ice will float, its edges sticking up on the surface of the water, float and melt and cease to be.'

How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary.

'She neither saw nor heard the waterfall, it was lower down. Here there was merely a whisper of water as it travlled downwards, and up at the outlet it was quite still and noiseless.

This was the outlet of the great lake: a placid sliding of water from under the edge of the ice, so smooth that it was scarcely possible to see it. But a veil of vapour rose up from it in the cold. She was not conscious that she was standing looking at it; it was like being in a good dream. A good dream could be made out of so simple a thing. She felt no pangs of conscience because she was out on a walk without permission, and it would perhaps be difficult to find excuses for it. The placid water flowing away from the ice filled her with quiet joy.

She would probably lose her hold and fall down into a hollow where the shadows were, this time too, but it was a good moment and the other was chased away again by the sight that streamed towards her: the great river coming noiseless and clear from under the ice, flowing through her and lifting her up and saying something to her which was just what she needed.

They were so still, she and the water. . .'

The complete review's Review:
http://www.complete-review.com

The Ice Palace is an eerily disturbing read. In simple, poetic language it tells a fairly simple if devastating tale of friendship and childhood. It's a tale of losing and lost innocence, but unlike almost any other.

Unn is the new girl in this Norwegian town. She never knew her father and recently lost her mother, and now she has moved here to live with her Auntie. She hasn't really integrated yet, staying apart from the other children, unwilling and unable to participate in their activities.

Like the other children Siss is curious about the new girl, and she feels a sort of connexion to her. And then the day comes when Unn lets Siss know she has to speak to her. She invites her over to her house.

They're both eleven, both very much still children. Siss is allowed to go to Unn's by herself, despite the winter-darkness, because the way is almost like that to school. They're both excited by this get-together, but also unsure of themselves -- of what they want and can expect from each other, of what to say and how to behave. They still find it difficult to express themselves, overcome by ineffable feelings. 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.

Siss is the warier one, uncertain if she is prepared for everything Unn wants to share; she gets set to leave several times. Unn doesn't say much but some of what she does is more than Siss can handle. "I'm not sure that I'll go to heaven", Unn confides, for example. So:Siss was on tenterhooks now. It was unsafe here. What might not Unn say ? But to be with Unn ! For ever. She would say before they parted: You can tell me more another time. Whenever you like, another time. We couldn't have gone further this evening. It had been a great deal as it was. But if they were to go further it would make things impossible. Home again as quickly as she could.
Of course she doesn't say any of this to Unn. But they both know, they both understand each other. They've found each other, and for each it's both a terrifying discovery and a relief, even as so much has been left unsaid.
Unn can't bring herself to go to school the next day:
No, she only had one thought today: Siss.
This is the way to her. This is the way to Siss.
Can't meet her, only think about her.
Mustn't think about the other now, only about Siss whom I have found.
Instead of going to school Unn goes to a local natural wonder, the waterfall that slowly freezes over in the winter, creating a fabulous ice-palace:
That was where she was going. And she would not think about the other. She would be free of it today !

And it's a fantastic structure, overwhelming the little girl:
It was an enchanted palace. She must try to find a way in ! It was bound to be full of curious passages and doorways -- and she must get in. It looked so extraordinary that Unn forgot everything else as she stood in front of it. She was aware of nothing else as she stood in front of it. She was aware of nothing but her desire to enter.

Vesaas' descriptions of Unn's exploration are masterful, a sense of menace and dread -- it's clear what will happen -- hovering over a narrative that describes a voyage of discovery that is all childish innocence and slow (self-)recognition and wonder. In making it a childhood passage where purity is overlaid on violation Vesaas writes a chapter that is almost unbearable in its poignancy. Despite the artificiality of it there's not a false note to it, as Vesaas uses the natural -- the crisp, clear cold, the glassy ice, the play of light, the powerful sounds -- and never needs spell out what unnaturalness happened to Unn.

There's a stunning erotic charge to the narrative here, too, as the small body squeezes through the wet fissures as Unn makes her way deeper and deeper into this glassy labyrinth: "now she managed it, slender and supple as she was, when she pushed hard enough", etc. Even in its conclusion there are obvious comparisons to the sexual act: when last we see her: "She wanted to sleep; she was languid and limp and ready". Innocence and violation are inextricably intertwined throughout.

Only when school is out do they realise that Unn is missing, and the whole town begins an exhaustive search. Siss insists on being part of it -- and as someone who talked to Unn so recently they keep asking her whether or not Unn might have said something to indicate where she went, or why.
"What did Unn tell you ?" they want to know, but:
"It was only something I said !"
"I don't think so. I can see you know something. What did Unn say ?"
"I can't tell you."
"Why not ?"
"Because it wasn't like that, she didn't say it ! And she didn't say a word about hiding."

The Ice Palace is full of what wasn't said, and especially of Siss reacting to and dealing with what remains unspoken. Nothing weighs on her like what Unn didn't say, but in descriptions of her interaction with her classmates, her parents, and the Auntie Vesaas captures the childish (and also adult) difficulty of communicating and of dealing with the unspoken very well.
What happens to Unn changes Siss; it's a lot for her to bear. Vesaas nicely describes how the others try to be accommodating, and make it easier for her. The way the children treat each other is, in particular, well-captured, the fumbling efforts and small gestures and big meanings and sudden about-faces effortlessly woven into the story. The children are remarkably convincing as characters (and unlike most found in fiction, where the temptation to make them too precocious or cute seems almost impossible for authors to resist).

Sex is buried deep at the bottom of this story: the girls are still innocents, only vaguely sensing that there is much that is still beyond their comprehension -- and that is still unspeakable -- and The Ice Palace is also about that attempt to preserve (in pure ice ...) childish innocence. So also the other children want things to be the same as always after Unn's disappearance, to return to that predictable childhood constancy of before; Siss finds it harder than the others, unwilling -- and scared of -- letting go of her memory of Unn, of what she shared with Unn.

"Is anything the matter ?" she asked.
"Yes. Things aren't the same as they used to be yet," he replied, looking her straight in the eyes.
She felt a desire to touch him, or rather that he would do something of the sort. Neither made any move.
"No, it's not the same as it used to be," said Siss, more unwillingly than her expression warranted. "And you surely know why."
"It can be as it used to be," he said obstinately.
"Are you so sure ?"
"No, but it can be as it used to be just the same."
She was glad he had said it, and yet ...

Vesaas beautifully captures this so tentative pre-adolescent fumbling towards relationships, both between Unn and Siss, and then among all their classmates. The simple, repetitive language of the novel underscores this -- as it does the sense of the unsayable. But Siss and Unn's efforts to express themselves fail not only because of lack of experience (or daring): some things are simply too overwhelming to find the proper (or any) words for -- as the Auntie character also seems to suggest to Siss.

The Ice Palace is haunting and deeply disturbing -- though in as much of a good way as 'disturbing' can be. 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.

A very impressive work, highly recommended.