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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
Smilla's Sense of Snow
by Peter Hoeg
April 1997
Synopsis
"Smilla's Sense of Snow presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Inuit, but she lives in Copenhagen. She is thirty-seven, single, childless, moody, and she refuses to fit in. Smilla's six-year-old Inuit neighbor, Isaiah, manages only with a stubbornness that matches her own to befriend her. When Isaiah falls off a roof and is killed, Smilla doesn't believe it's an accident. She has seen his tracks in the snow, and she knows about snow. She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her to get involved. But opposition appeals to Smilla. As all of Copenhagen settles down for a quiet Christmas, Smilla's investigation takes her from a fervently religious accountant to a tough-talking pathologist and an alcoholic shipping magnate and into the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth - and finally onto a ship with an international cast of villains bound for a mysterious mission on an uninhabitable island off Greenland. To read Smilla's Sense of Snow is to be taken on a magical, nerve-shattering journey - from the snow-covered streets of Copenhagen to the awesome beauty of the Arctic ice caps. A mystery, a love story, and an elegy for a vanishing way of life, Smilla's Sense of Snow is a breathtaking achievement, an exceptional feat of storytelling." (source)
Reviews
- "Smilla is as resourceful in the face of extinction as James Bond, and this story too has implausible, entertaining shifts--of gear, tone, direction, genre--whenever a premature ending has to be avoided. . . . As events rush on, their significance is unexamined. . . . Selfishness, menace and systematic corruption form the fabric of this mysterious novel. Relationships are all based on suspicion, and love has to be 'like a military operation' (one inventive maneuverr has a particularly Scandinavian explicitness). Survival is for the richest and those with special skills, whether in classifying snow or sounds, in engineering or administering injections. Honed expertise even in violence, makes for a chilling, unreflecting efficiency. There is no such thing as society. Peter Hoeg has a remarkable feeling for sinister surprises." (Jim McCue - The Times Literary Supplement)
- "
[This] is a thriller, but it's a thriller like no other. Maybe a le Carre novel comes closest, with its brainy characters enmeshed in deliciously intricate conundrums fraught with moral, emotional and geopolitical dangers. But le Carre, whose view of women can most charitably be called old-fashioned, could never have created a narrator as daring and self-sufficient as Smilla. Most extraordinary of all is the setting: this novel takes place in the snows of Greenland, the ice floes of the North Atlantic, the endless dark of a Copenhagen winter. The only thing that thaws during this adventure is Smilla's long-frozen heart. . . . Smilla's Sense of Snow is such a hugely satisfying novel that it's hard to believe Peter Hoeg never wrote a thriller before." (Laura Shapiro - Newsweek)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.
Other Books by Peter Hoeg
- 'Borderliners'
- 'History of Danish Dreams'
- 'Tales of the Night'
- 'The Woman and the Ape'