The Ice Palace (Green Integer, #120) (Peter Owen modern classics) (Peter Owen Cased Classics)

by Tarjei Vesaas

A new edition of what is commonly seen as the legendary Norwegian writer's masterpiece. Siss and Unn are new friends ? so new that they have spent only one whole evening in each other's company. But so profound is that evening that when Unn inexplicably disappears Siss's world is shattered. Siss's struggle with her fidelity to the memory of her friend and Unn's fatal exploration of the strange, terrifyingly beautiful frozen waterfall that is the Ice Palace are described in prose of a lyrical economy that ranks among the most memorable achievements of modern literature. Tarjei Vesaas is regarded as one of the finest writers ever to have come out of Scandinavia ? he is notable for having been nominated for the Nobel Prize three times and has been considered one of the greatest prose stylists never to have won. Nevertheless, his reputation is secure and growing all the time. Peter Owen has long considered The Ice Palace to be the greatest work ever to have come from his publishing house, which boasts seven Nobel Prize winners on its list.

• ISBN10: 0720613752
• ISBN13: 9780720613759
• Publish Date: 30 January 2011 (first published January 1966)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Peter Owen Publishers
• Edition: epub
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 176
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

I have this tucked away corner of a shelf with a small stack of books, a treasure trove of only the most specific kind of simple, magical, eerie, uncannily wise books. Saved up, tucked aside, bottled away, just in case there’s one day, off chance, wild notion, life gets inadvertently full of little tangled limbs and skint knees who clamor for bedtime stories with sleepy eyes. “Break glass in case of kids,” it could say.

They are not children’s books. But, somehow, they are the books that belong to the world children inhabit already, the ones that give us, all grown up, merely a taste and a too-brief pass into the way we used to have the world ourselves.

This is one such book, striking and surreal and under glass. Perfect for now, and saved up for one day, maybe.

“It had been a time of snow and a time of death and of closed bedrooms— and she had arrived bang on the other side of it, her eyes dimming for joy because a boy had said, ‘You with the dimples.’

“Woodwind players are walking at the sides of the road. You walk as fast as you can, and wish at the same time that the road would never end.”