The Ice Palace (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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She hasn't really integrated yet, staying apart from the other children, unwilling and unable to participate in their activities. The concise, lyrical narrative evokes the Japanese haiku style, where the misleading simplicity of the text is in fact overflowing with symbolism and metaphors worthy of close reading, making of this brief novel a gem in form of a prose poem. 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 but her desire to enter. Robert Swindells was born in Bradford in 1939, the eldest of five children. He left the local Secondary Modern School at fifteen to work as a copy holder on the local newspaper. At seventeen he enlisted in the RAF and served for three years, two in Germany. On being discharged he worked as a clerk, engineer and printer until 1969 when he entered college to train as a teacher having obtained five 'O' levels at night-school. His first book ' When Darkness Comes' was written as a college thesis and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1972. In 1980 he gave up teaching to write full time. He likes travelling and visits many schools each year, talking and reading stories to children. He is the secutatry of his local Peace Movement group. Brother in the Land is his first book for Oxford University Press. He is married with two grown-up daughters and lives in Bradford. How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary." - Doris Lessing, The Independent

This book, written by a non-militant bigot, is a mixture of pagan and Christian morality with a non-aggressive and yet intense bias against homosexuality, deemed as a kind of hysteria or aberration that can occur when young people, a girl, in this case, grows in an all-women environment and can be contagious, transmitted and yet cured. Siss leaves promptly and Unn suffers pangs of doubt. Had she overshared? Did Siss feel the same way? Was she imagining their connection? T)he cool, lucid language of Elizabeth Rokkan's English version allows the complex edifice of Vesaas's symbolism to shine out from the prose with a clarity, even a pragmatism, that is both startling and profound. (...) The Ice Palace is an elegant poetic fable that expresses through its unique language an instinctive, rather than an intellectual, human connection with questions of isolation and schism. Its modernist preoccupations are profoundly disquieting, and yet it comforts the reader because, paradoxically, its message connects us. Our isolation is what we have in common, and the existential questions posed by Vesaas are, by definition, the province of everyone; this is a triumphant study in the reality of human anguish." - Matthew Bradley, Times Literary Supplement Doris Lessing was quite right when she said "How simple this novel is. How subtle. How strong. How unlike any other. It is unique. It is unforgettable. It is extraordinary."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. Tarjei Vesaas is sometimes described as a modernist, but at moments in this novel – which is as stark and bare as a tree in midwinter – he seems more like a symbolist. Small elements of the natural world are freighted with enormous coded significance, and much is left unsaid: we never find out what Unn's great secret was, nor is the girls' mutual attraction ever really explained. Yet the prose itself is appealingly clear and straightforward, an effect that must have been heightened in the original by the fact that Vesaas wrote, unusually, in Nynorsk, instead of the traditional literary dialect of Bokmål. The contemporary English translation from Elizabeth Rokkan reads entirely naturally, I thought, and gives you a very clear idea of why Vesaas is considered such a giant of Norwegian letters. In making it a childhood passage where purity is overlaid on violation Vesaas writes a chapter that is almost unbearable in its poignancy.

Though Vessas’s novel The Birds is arguably his finest, The Ice Palace is arguably his most poetic. The tale of Siss and Unn, two eleven-year-old girls living in the hinterlands of Norway, is not merely a tale of childhood friendship, but is also a subtle and palpable excursion into the innocent recesses of sexual exploration." - Mark Axelrod, Review of Contemporary Fiction Fitzgerald’s ‘The Ice Palace’ is, first and foremost, about the differences between the North and the South in the United States, and the differing temperaments of the people who inhabit each. Whereas Sally Carrol’s South is associated with sleepiness, laziness, and warmth, Harry’s North is associated with coldness: both the coldness of the weather and the detached and even hostile attitudes of the locals. In the North, we might say, the coldness is a matter of temperament as well as temperature. Unn is the newcomer in Siss's school, an orphaned girl that grew up with her single mother, never met a father, and after her mother's death came to stay with her spinster Auntie. Unn insists on distancing herself from the others and yet there is an obvious attraction between her and her schoolmate, Siss: The vivacious 11-year-old Siss lives in a rural community in Norway. Her life is changed when a quiet girl, Unn, moves to the village to live with her aunt after the death of her unmarried mother. Siss and Unn can't wait to meet. They finally do, at Unn's house. They talk for a while, Unn shows Siss a picture from the family album of her father, then Unn persuades Siss that they should undress, just for fun. They do, watching each other, and Unn asks whether Siss can see if she is different. Siss says no, she can't, and Unn says she has a secret and is afraid she will not go to heaven. Soon they dress again, and the situation is rather awkward. Siss leaves Unn and runs home, overwhelmed by fear of the dark. 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".Maybe it's because I've lived most of my life in regions of tropical monsoon climate, but I love the cold, the snow, the blizzards, the ice structures, the frozen lakes, the endless white landscapes. In theory, I'm completely besotted with it. Si le sumamos además una ambientación invernal en Noruega, con la que el autor logra traspasar el frío gélido de sus páginas al lector, hace que esta sea una lectura en conjunto fascinante. La oscuridad toma un cariz revelador, la naturaleza está presente y sus cambios forman un paralelismo simbólico con la protagonista. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1994). Bruccoli, Matthew J. (ed.). A Life in Letters. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-19570-4– via Internet Archive. Like the other children Siss is curious about the new girl, and she feels a sort of connexion to her.

I say again, you must feel you are freed. It’s not right for you to go on as you are. It’s not like you. You’re a different person". Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1998) [1989]. Bruccoli, Matthew J. (ed.). The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner's. ISBN 0-684-84250-5– via Internet Archive. 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 Ice Palace / translated by Elizabeth Rokkan. - First edition of first English translation. - London: Peter Owen Publishers, 1966. - 176 pp. (hardcover)see Agnes Bolsø’s article “The Politics of Lesbian Specificity” in Queering Norway, Routledge, 2009, p. 49) From 1951-53 there ensued a fierce debate in Norway over a proposed change in the penal law of 1902. That law criminalized sexual acts between men and could result in penalties of up to one year in prison. It was particularly an alarm raised about the “seduction of adolescents” that lay behind the proposed change […] It took Norway 20 years to conclude that: “ a conversion to homosexuality via childhood seduction was unlikely and in 1972 Norway’s criminal law was changed so that sexual actions between men were no longer considered criminal”