The Ice Palace

By 1934, when The Great Cycle appeared, Tarjei Vesaas has published 11 works. In this novel he clearly showed the enduring qualities of his later work: delicate human portraiture, compelling symbolism and allegory, and constant sensitivity to human beings' universal turmoils of hope, fear, and love. By the end of his life Vesaas had written some 35 works of prose and poetry and had received the Venice Triennial Prize in 1952 and the Nordic Council Prize for literature in 1964. Perhaps his generation's foremost writer of novels and short stories, he wrote of common people in rural Norway who represented humanity at its best and worst. Children and adolescents occupy a special place in Vesaas's writing; in The Birds (1957), the reader participates in the inner life of a mentally impaired youth observing the adult world. Vesaas's realism is usually psychological rather than historical, as in The Seed (1940), which deals with the hatred, fear, and mass psychosis spawned in a small community by the murder of a girl. It is apparent that the barbarous acts of the killer's lynchers mirror the hideous transformation of decent people in Fascist Europe of the late 1930s. 020