rly beautiful and intense sublimated lesbian movie...the whole sequence of unn in the ice palace ;_; gestures and unspoken desires are what animate this, the dialogue really isnt important b/c its all in their faces.. The author wrote a dozen novels, almost all of which have been translated into English. He wrote in Nynorsk, a dialect of Norwegian. Despite all that cold and ice, there is burning brightly the glow of a friendship, if only a brief one, that cascades a warm lyrical emotion over Vasaas's eerie and frozen landscape. Along with the vivid descriptions of the land, the observations look mostly at Siss, who not only has to deal with the vanishing and loss of Unn, but also coming to terms with the realisation that the fun and magical elements of childhood are slowly turning from liquid to vapour. Basically, she is a tween. However, I failed to engage in the mutual fascination that has frozen the two girls into their own icicle. As this spell is water-coloured in a very suggestive language with much unsaid, I wondered whether in the process of translation the original vacuum had been somewhat dislocated.

I guess I will be in the minority in giving this novel a ‘3’ when it is highly rated on GR. In addition, this novel from 1963 is considered a classic of Norwegian literature. It won the Nordic Council's Literature Prize for the best novel that year. In my edition Doris Lessing wrote a blurb praising the lyrical writing. see Agnes Bolsø’s article “The Politics of Lesbian Specificity” in Queering Norway, Routledge, 2009, p. 49) In making it a childhood passage where purity is overlaid on violation Vesaas writes a chapter that is almost unbearable in its poignancy.It's been an unusually cold autumn and an unlikely ice palace of epic proportions has formed from a frozen waterfall, and the dark and the cold have dominated the villagers' minds. 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. Siss is the warier one, uncertain if she is prepared for everything Unn wants to share; she gets set to leave several times. 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. In the corridor beyond the electrified floor, there are yet more mines. The first door on the left leads to a laboratory containing hostile Mechanical Sentries and several holding tanks containing human bodies.

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: Now that the station has been secured as a holding of SubLight Salvage, Lilya Hagen will be interested in an update. She can be found in SubLight Headquarters on the Groundbreaker. I say, there is something that Vesaas definitely missed. You see, ice can also be seen as a prism to break white light up into the colours of the rainbow. Unn is translated as "the one who is loved" yet it can be read as the prefix un-loved as in abandoned. 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.However, it's never clarified that Siss was a vivacious, bossy girl before Unn walked into her life. Siss' misery begins right from the first scene, which is kind of irritating because Siss was a proactive carefree girl. The role of her school friends in what I interpreted as the 'shattering of the ice palace' was not brought out. Siss and Unn are duals of each other in the book. At one point during the search, a man mistakes Siss for Unn. This lovely detail is left out in the movie. Oh well. A new girl arrives at the school. She is called Unn and is also 11-years old. Her mother recently died and her father was never around, so she has come to live with her auntie in a cottage on the outskirts of the village. On Unn’s first day ay school Siss and the other children try to encourage her to join with them in the playground, but she politely declines. Unn prefers to stand on her own away from the group, sometimes watching them at play but mostly just gazing absently at the wall. Esta es la historia de una amistad que se forja fugazmente, con una intensidad puramente inocente y genuina entre dos niñas de once años. Sucederá algo que cambiará radicalmente lo que pudo ser pero no fue, pero no por ello quedará en el olvido. Cobrará importancia el palacio de hielo que se forma cuando la cascada se hiela en invierno, sus enormes salas dotadas de vida y los seres que habitan en los bosques harán de este un lugar mágico y simbólico.

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” 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.

Siss, one of Unn’s classmates who is lively and popular, strikes up a friendship with her. But the very next day after their first awkward meeting, Unn disappears. No one knows what has become of her but every one suspects Siss knows more than she lets on. This novel reads like a long form poem as there is so much below the surface and the actual words. It is filled with symbols and metaphors that are very direct to the plot and characters and open up a much broader understanding of Siss and her tribulations. While the prose is swift and the novel is short, you would do well to slow down and really examine what Vesaas has written much as you would do with any poem. Without giving anything away, the ice palace found in the novel can be viewed on many different levels; from a symbol of several of the characters, as death, or even as the novel itself. I don’t want to go into it as not to provide spoilers but after reading this I felt cheated that I didn’t read this for a class and didn’t have an essay to formulate as I had so much to say about all of Vesaas’ hidden messages.