Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter HøegMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Smilla is the reason I love Smilla so much. This seems true of all my favourite mysteries. Arkady Renko. Precious Ramotswe. Smilla Jaspersen.
She lives like a bachelor, hates children, and tries to be fierce. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘if I give the impression that it’s only my mouth that’s rough. I do my best to be rough all over’ (84).
By the end of the book she’s burned the hair off the top of her head, got a black eye, is bruised in various places all over, and has been tied up, beaten and nearly killed a half dozen times.
And she keeps going. She doesn’t sleep. She seeks the truth. She doesn’t care if she dies in the process. She doesn’t have anything to live for. Again this reminds me so much of Renko. (Martin Cruz Smith is quoted on the back of my copy: ‘She shimmers with intelligence.’)
Smilla seduces through her strangeness. A Greenlander in Denmark, we know she feels quite alien to those around her. We wonder at her near-supernatural powers, her intuitive understanding of ice and snow. She is mythologized: as an Inuit, as a native person with a magical connection to the land of her people.
Themes of colonised identity thread through the book, and Smilla is very much half-and-half. Half Danish, half Greenlandic, fully comfortable in neither culture, always an outsider in both. She seems to enjoy her partly self-imposed isolation until a little boy comes along who understands her better than anyone else ever has.
Her connection with Isaiah goes beyond friendship – they are more like soul mates, though thirty years apart in age. Like Smilla, Isaiah has a preternatural intelligence and a crafty self-sufficiency. For a six-year-old, he seems like he’s lived several lifetimes already.
Isaiah’s secrets drive Smilla out into the cold, across frozen bays, into ice fields, searching.
For me this book exquisitely blends two forces: the mystical pull of the Arctic and Smilla’s indomitable will. It is brilliant.
View all my reviews
So glad you liked this book! It's one of my favorites ever. I don't like any other books by this writer for some reason, but Smilla is brilliant.
ReplyDeleteI loved the character Smilla but have never managed to get very far with the book despite 2 attempts with both the English and the Dutch translations. But then for some reason I always struggle with Scandinavian books.
ReplyDelete