“Is it fine out of doors?” asked her mother.
“Fine? It’s windy and raining.”
“It can be fine all the same, can’t it?”
— The Ice Palace (1963) by Tarjei Vesaas, p. 116
“For, well, you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool / By making his world a little colder”
— “Hey Jude” by The Beatles (1968)
With hindsight, it’s not surprising the title of this book appealed to me from a shelf in the Oslo airport bookstore. I had just left New York in July 2025 during a historic heatwave, only to land in Norway and find it dealing with its own historic heatwave. An ice palace sounded like what I needed.
First published in 1963, The Ice Palace is set in a small Norwegian village and follows one winter in the lives of its schoolchildren and townsfolk. Our main characters are two girls: Unn, new in town, lonely, and grieving a family loss, and the lively Siss, a popular leader among the children. I would venture that a third character is the Norwegian winter itself, described so beautifully in these pages. Of special interest to the village is what the schoolchildren call the Ice Palace, a frozen waterfall in a nearby fjord that exerts an almost-mystical pull on the community.
In the book’s first act, Unn and Siss strike up what the back-cover copy calls “an intense friendship.” At face value that seems straightforward, yet it gains fresh resonance when you recall that homosexuality was still criminalized in Norway in 1963. After a tender scene in which one girl confesses, “I’m not sure that I’ll go to heaven,” the latent LGBT theme becomes unmistakable. A lesser writer might have made it mawkish, weird, or predatory, but Tarjei Vesaas (1897–1970), who was 66 years old when the novel was published and who, by the time he passed, had been nominated for the Nobel Prize more than thirty times, handles it with delicacy and moral seriousness while keeping the novel’s broader, universal questions in view.
After an awkward end to a play date between Unn and Siss, Unn wanders into the titular Ice Palace and disappears. The remainder of the novel chronicles how Siss confronts that loss and how the community’s shared grief slowly crystallizes the book’s central insight.
Do not despair. Life will place you in situations you do not choose. But do not despair. Do not visit the ice palace. Do not be lulled by its somber song; nothing can be made good of it. It seeks only to destroy. Do not despair.