Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg

My 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.

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In progress - Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

Frøken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne. English translation copyright 1993. This book takes me right back.

In 1993 I turned 15. This book reminds me of how I used to read. I was a total immersion reader, barely surfacing for meals. I wish I could share that feeling with anyone who doesn't have that experience with good books.

But I also read to define myself. To find out who I was, who I wanted to be. I drifted through months of reading only existentialist literature. I dove headlong into Anne Rice. I forgot my own name when I found The Mists of Avalon.

But I definitely wanted to be Smilla. She is hard, fierce, uncannily intelligent, well dressed, and gifted with several extra senses.

The sense of presence, that someone or something is there before she can see or hear anything. The sense of timing, always asking the exact right question when there's no time to dilly dally. And the sense of snow, the one she is most known for.

I still adore Smilla. And I worship the way Peter Høeg has with his storytelling. From one paragraph to the next, we might be reading about a mathematical principle, a memory of time spent in boarding school, or a bitter discourse on colonialism. No matter what it's about, each sentence flawlessly advances the story -- one of the most fascinating and gripping stories I know of.

I watch the sunset, which lasts three hours at this time of year. As if the sun, on the verge of leaving, had discovered qualities in the world that are now causing it to have second thoughts about departing. (13)

In this century the Inuit's life has been a tightrope dance on a cord fastened at one end to the world's least hospitable land with the world's most severe and fluctuating climate, and fastened at the other end to the Danish colonial administration. (79)

I've thrown a little cold water on my face. The possibility of my having brushed my hair can not be ruled out. (99)

One of the signs that your life needs tidying up is when your possessions gradually have come to consist mainly of things that you borrowed a long time ago but which it's now too late to give back (104)

Photo by J. Steuben