By Tarjei Vesaas
I read this on the 15th of October, 2024, in Tokyo. I really liked it. It’s a story about two eleven-year-old girls in a Norwegian village, Siss and Unn. Unn is a new arrival, while Siss is the leader of her group of girls at school. They strike an intense, electric friendship over one night, but the next day Unn is missing. We see this from her perspective: the embarrassment (not quite - nervousness?) of seeing Siss at school the next day, the decision to go to the frozen lake, and explore the ice palace.
The scene where she enters the ice palace is phantasmagorical and ethereal and haunting. It’s a huge ice sculpture formed at the base of a waterfall, and the descriptions, half-seen and through a strange state of mind, are vivid and hallucinatory.
The rest of the book is about Siss dealing with Unn’s disappearance, her promise to remember her, her isolation from her classmates, and the eventual forgiveness and reconciliation with her friends and Unn’s aunty.
It’s a beautifully written book. The close-knit and supportive and perhaps oppressive small Norwegian village is omnipresent; the girls’ emotions and experiences are written in this beautifully elusive, allusive, imprecise manner that is both reminiscent of childhood and deeply metaphorical, similar to I Saw the TV Glow.
In particular, I loved Siss and Unn’s one night of friendship, and Unn’s exploration of the ice palace. At times the book could be frustratingly vague, but it all added to a frozen cloudy monument, glittering and unreachable.