The Ice Palace

Tarjei Vesaas is a Norwegian treasure. I read The Birds earlier this year and decided to revisit The Ice Palace, his most famous novel. Two girls just start becoming friends. Unn nearly tells Siss a secret and runs away into the cold. Siss spends the novel denying the fact that her friend is likely dead. The town gives up long before she does. There are great moments showing her rage about this. In one scene a new student is about to sit in Unn's old space. Siss yells at the new girl eventually getting the whole class to agree with her. Later on Siss goes to The Ice Palace itself. The weather is more than atmosphere here. It's a captivating character in itself. Vesaas was nominated a few times for the Nobel prize. I don't see why he didn't win. Less worthy writers have won. I will be investigating more of his works.

The Drifting Classroom volume 3

I read the first two volumes five years ago but I was able to catch up quickly. This is an anime about a classroom that drifts into a scary future. In this volume the kids have resorted to murder and even cannibalism. Sho is able to talk to his mom in the hope that they all will go back. I think the kids in this book are pretty smart. I said this in another entry if it would be me I would be a goner. This was a pretty good conclusion to the series. The ending surprised me. It wasn't what I expected.

Our Town

At first I didn't get the appeal of this day as it seemed another standard representation of small town life and love. Then in the final act it turned avant garde as the dead characters of the town talked about what made life and that town so meaningful. The team behind The Fantasticks worked on a musical of this for years only to have Wilder's nephew say they couldn't do it after all. I think they would have made one of their best. I need to watch the movie.

The Admirable Crichton

This was a cute play by J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. A rich family is stranded on a desert island. Their butler becomes the leader and the one who saves the day. He even wins the love of one of the girls Mary. But will everything will be the same when they come back home? This was later made into a movie in the 1950s which I have to watch. Yes Peter Pan was J.M. Barrie's masterpiece but it's fun reading what else the writer had to say. 3/5

Rock Crystal

It's curious NYRB (New York Review Books) has put this out twice. They put Rock Crystal out as a novella alone. I guess once NYRB realized how great of a writer Stifter was they decided to release the whole short story collection it came from Motley Stones. One edition is translated by Marianne Moore, a poet I like, so if you're a fan of hers then it's worth investigating. This is about two children who visit their grandparents during winter but get lost in the snow on the way home. Soon there's a search party. It's a perfect book to read during December. There's something enchanting about it.

The Motley Stones

This is an interesting collection from NYRB. They had already released one of the short stories "Rock Crystal" on its own as novella. It's here but with a different translation. That's one of my favorite short stories so I'm going to review it next week as an entry itself. What is here in The Motely Stones is pretty good. I already read "Limestone" about a priest which was ok. I felt the same way about the story Rock Milk too. I liked the beginning of "Rock Milk" when you meet the family more than the war elements that came later. "Granite" is pretty good. It's about two children who survive a plague and how they meet later in adulthood. Then there's "Cat-Silver" about a wild girl who becomes friends with a family and eventually saves one of them from a fire. I really like the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter. His work is still being translated today which is all very nice but he should be just as recognized as the people he influenced like Nietzsche and Thomas Mann. He had a vivid imagination. He's apparently has a following in Germany but not to the USA for some reason.

The House of the Spirits

This was made into a 1990s movie with Meryl Streep. I have no desire to see the movie as its not the way I imagined the Latin American novel to be. It's over 400 pages. I read it in a short time. It's about the Trueba family. You meet the clairoyvant Clara and her husband Esteban. He's an aggressive man and she doesn't return his love. There's their daughter Bianca who has a forbidden romance with a musician. There's Bianca's daughter Alba who falls for a revolutionary named Miguel. Esteban's bastard son is the one who almost brings about the destruction of the family. It's a pretty impressive debut and remains Allende's most famous book. This isn't light reading as it contains a few taboo topics. The magical realism of the book is pretty cool as it makes the book almost otherworldly. I am interested in reading Isabel Allende's other books.