Customer Reviews

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

No need to summarise the plot this far down the road, only to address some of the understandable but misguided criticisms that have appeared in customer reviews both here and on the amazon.co.uk site.

This is a book that requires genuine commitment on the part of the reader. To condemn the temporal disjointedness or the one-sided characterisations is akin to taking Van Gogh to task over his utterly unrealistic stars.

The most common criticism is of the book's ending, and indeed if this were a routine holiday potboiler you would expect the ending to be different: More unexpected, more dramatic, more conclusive, more plausible. But then this isn't just another slasher epic, it's a finely tuned work of art in which everything (including the denouement and the reader's reactions to it) is designed to serve the author's underlying agenda.

Hoeg makes no secret of what he is doing: I don't have the exact words to hand, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone who has the fortune to have the book still to look forward to. But Smilla actually states in so many words that all the strange goings on at the end are like a metaphor for the confrontation between man (represented by the Inuit with their inituitive relationship with the world) and the decreasingly "real" world as it is mediated to us by our cherished machines.

Thus the frisson that every good chiller ends with, comes in this case not from what is happening to the characters (with whom perhaps we are not intended to have become heavily involved), but from unexpected revelations about our own predicament.

Trash fiction is an escape from real life, and is designed to usher us into a world that is more attractive or at least more comprehensible than the one in which we live. In contrast, art opens our eyes to the real world, the world to which we too easily become anaesthetised. Thus art is never comfortable, and never offers cheap thrills.

In "Smilla", the protagonists are ourselves. It's a painful but beautiful and intensely rewarding journey for those willing to take it.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow is a fascinating book. It's quite unjust that on Amazon at least, it seems barely known, while books of much lesser ambition and accomplishment are lauded.

The book is actually hard to describe. In plot terms: the heroine, a prickly loner, is drawn into a plot by a child's death. Sensing wrongdoing, she battles police, bureaucracy and sinister conspiracies to get to the truth, helped by a misfit band of characters, all while falling in love against her will with her main collaborator - or is he the enemy?

In the hands of most authors, this would just be another of the thousands of wannabe thrillers published each year. Peter Hoeg, with the setting, the character, and the originality of his writing, makes Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow something quite different.

The book is set in cold, cold climates, ranging from urban Copenhagen to the fjords & glaciers of Smilla's homeland of Greenland, to the seas off west Greenland that terrify even the hardest sailors - the 'Sea of Fog' and the 'Iceberg Cemetery'.

Smilla Jaspersen, of unusual parentage - her father a Danish medical specialist, her mother a Greenlandic traditional hunter - is a scientist, rationalist, mathematician and expert on snow and ice in all its forms. After her mother disappears on a hunting trip the child Smilla is taken to Denmark by her father - to a foreign land of boarding schools where no-one speaks her language, and people look down on the dark, uncouth Greenlanders.

As much as a thriller this is also a story of displacement and dispossession, of how irrevocably your homeland can shape you and remain in your heart. The well-meaning Danes colonise Greenland with the usual devastating effects on the native inhabitants - Smilla's own brother, the clan's supreme hunter, is reduced to sweeping docks and then suicide.

Smilla herself is educated and urbane enough to survive city life - she dresses elegantly, reads Euclid, understands bureaucracy. But the subversive misfit of her childhood is never far from the surface and she's a genuine rebel, in a way that the savvy, wisecracking heroines of US/UK stories somehow never are.

The language, while lyrically translated, is very unlike anything that would be written in native English, it's crammed indiscriminately with mundane details, philosphical musings, and a few wonderful insights. It's not for lightweight easy-reading fans - neither is the final revelation of the 'mystery' which, although implausibly stupid, somehow doesn't detract too much from the overall spell of the book. If you're bored with the standard murder mystery/thriller books, please - find and read this one.

I didn't read this book for a long time, because I thought that Miss Smilla sounded like Miss Marple. Boy, was I wrong. The plot starts as a fairly sedate detective story, and works its way into something like a James Bond film.

Smilla is like a clever sister to Kinsey Milhone (from Sue Grafton's ABC series), gritty and always ready with a withering comment. You're right on side with her. But Smilla has greater depth.

The narrative voice is superb. The book also shows an impressive mastery of a range of interesting technical topics (in this respect it reminds me of Iain Banks), many of them related to snow and ice.

I felt that, occasionally, some of the links in the plot were not entirely clear, and I would probably have preferred a different ending. But these are minor comments, and I was delighted that I finally read this book.

By coincidence, the book I'm currently reading is called "The Worst Journey in the World". It deals with an antarctic expedition, and I think it might complement Smilla very well.

The snow...the ice...the cold...all are wonderfully described in this beautifully written novel. I bought this book in the summertime, but knowing it's winter Danish setting wisely held off from reading it till the winter -- reading this in summer heat just wouldn't be right!

At its most basic, this is a great whodunnit. Smilla, with her Greenlander ability to "read" tracks and forms in the snow (hence the title), knows that her little boy neighbour did not simply trip and fall from the snow-topped roof of their building...The tracks tell Smilla something more sinister, and she is determined to get to the root of it.

Smilla herself is a wonderful character, sometimes appearing sympathetic and warm, other times cold and distant. In other words, she is entirely convincing.

READ THIS BOOK! It had me on the edge of my seat and was a thrilling page turner.

A postcolonial thriller set in Copenhagen and Greenland? Unlikely, but here it is, in all its broody frigidity. Unlike many others, I found Smilla to be a fascinating protagonist. Half-Inuit, half-Danish, she is rapidly approaching middle age, and although a world-class expert on ice, she can't hold a steady job. Plagued by something approaching self hatred, excessive introspectiveness, and stubbornness, she is either nasty or sarcastic to almost everyone, never allowing people to see inside her. Perhaps one of the best female characters I've come across that was written by a man, she is not a nice person, nor one would particularly care to know, but she is tough and resourceful heroine. When her one friend, a little neighbour boy falls to his death from the roof, she doggedly pursues the matter as a murder, rather than the accident the police say it is. Her tenacity leads her along a wending path to the Cryolite Corporation, who were involved in mining in Greenland, and eventually to some very powerful, shadowy figures. The semi-procedural tone of this first section works fairly well, as Smilla manages to get others to tell her what she wants to know, without ever kow-towing to them. Her strained relationship to her rich father is ably worked in, as is a potentially burgeoning love affair. Also woven into all this is the tale of Denmark's colonization of Greenland.

Having upped the stakes considerably, the second part of the book is a tension-filled high seas affair. She becomes part of the crew on an icebreaker headed way up north in bad weather, in an adventure that she hopes will uncover the reason for the boy's death. The cat and mouse games aboard the icebreaker with the crew and passengers are outstanding, as she tries to uncover the ship's mission. Unfortunately, the final act is the undoing of all that preceded it, as the book veers off into X-Filesish, sci-fi threats to the world, and then fails to end altogether! It's book rich in both human and natural detail, in an interesting, harsh setting, but due to the awful ending, I can't say that I'd recommend it.

This is a compelling and intelligent novel, slightly let down by a dissapointing ending. The book concerns Smilla, a native Greenlander living in Copehnhagen, and how the footprints a neighbours child left in snow before falling to his death lead her on a voyage of dicovery, into the depths of her own psyche and memories of childhood, as well as unravelling the circumstances surrounding the death. As a straightforward adventure/mystery story, the book works remarkably well. Peter Hoeg teases us and keeps us turning the pages, witholds information and throws us scraps concerning the mystery at the novels heart, then builds our expectations towards a final scene of revelation and confrontation on a glacial island near Greenland. The novel has real depth as well: Smilla's character is sympathetically drawn, and she is prone to questioning and insecurity of the sort we all face. She is convincing and likeable, at times despicable, the cold in her heart reflecting the icy wastes of her birth, at times warmingly sensitive. Hoeg has also clearly researched the novel very carefully- the sections on board ship as Smilla travels to Greenland are wholly convincing, while Smillas regular allusions to the works of great mathematicians and scientists she has studied are welcome and intriguing,lending the novel a technical edge I found necessary, as it imbues the central mystery with more credibility. Peripheral characters are cleverly drawn too: the interaction between Smilla and the mechanic is subtle and gentle.
What Hoeg creates with this novel is an adventure yarn in the grand tradition, with all the intrigue and occasional scenes of violence and disaster this suggests. Yet beneath the surface of the novel lies a telling piece of classic literature: Smillas life, her thoughts and insecurities draw us in utterly, while her musings on the plight of the Greenlander in Denmark, and of Greenland in general, are both educational and emotive.
My only gripe with the novel was the ending, which felt as though Hoeg had built us into such a frenzy of excitement and anticipation no revelation, at the last, would suffice to satiate our desire.
Despite this, the novel is highly recommended, as a story and as a telling social document and insightful character study.
Well worth the time.

Smilla Jaspersen - half Dane, half Greenlander - knows, from marks left on a snow covered rooftop that her young friend, Isaiah, didn't accidentally fall to his death, as the police would prefer to believe. But they don't have Smilla's feeling for snow. The hunt for the truth leads Smilla to the icy wastes of Greenland, and the Cryolite Corporation's sixty-five-million year old secret.

Despite its rather vague ending I enjoyed reading this book, with its tight, almost Iain Banks narrative style like in Complicity, and the intense viewpoint of Smilla as she tells of her search for the truth, her background, and feelings toward those she is associated with.

Peter Hoeg translates so well into English, but what must the original Danish be like! What a wonderful feast of language, exotic and strange characters, and locations. This is a very beautiful , heartwrenching exploration of the place of the misfit,the intelligent and sensitive outsider who somehow needs to reconcile her Greenlandic upbringing with a scientific,20th century northern European heritage and existence.Greenlanders in Denmark, like Aboriginals in Australia, are susceptible to alchohol and welfare dependency."Civilization" has ruined them by destroying their selfrespect and robbing them of ther language and skills. Smilla fights herself (she trusts nobody, and rightly so}, and she fights the system. The second half of the book becomes more of an action thriller and lacks the abstraction, mathematics and philosophy which made the first section absolutely seductive to me.However an excellent book, worth reading and re-reading.

On a cold December day in Copenhagen, a young boy named Isaiah falls to his death from the roof of the block of flats where he lives. The official police view is that he slipped and fell while playing on the roof. Smilla Jaspersen, a neighbour of Isaiah and his mother, does not accept that his death was an accident. Isaiah had a fear of heights, so was unlikely to have been playing on the roof; moreover, the footprints in the snow do not support the police version. Smilla therefore decides to start her own investigation to find out what really happened.

Isaiah and his mother belonged to Denmark's Greenlandic minority, and Smilla herself grew up in Greenland, the daughter of a Danish father and Greenlandic mother. She is in her late thirties, and works as a freelance mathematician and expert on the physics of ice and snow, although she has no formal academic qualifications, having left university without taking a degree. She is also known to the police as a former left-wing activist, which means that they do not welcome her intervention in the case. She discovers, however, that Isaiah's father was an employee of a Danish mining corporation and that he died in mysterious circumstances during an expedition to Greenland organised by this corporation. She begins to suspect that Isaiah's death was also in some way linked to the company, and learns that they are organising another voyage to Gela Alta, a small island off the coast of Greenland, although she does not know what the object of this voyage is. Nevertheless, she joins the crew of the ship as a stewardess, just ahead of the police who are trying to arrest her, believing that the key to the mystery lies on this remote island.

In many ways the plot of the novel reminded me of a film. (It was itself made into a very good film by Bille August).The first part of the book, set in Copenhagen itself, was reminiscent of the films noirs of the forties and fifties. It could almost be the plot of a Humphrey Bogart film, if one can imagine a female, Danish Humphrey Bogart translated from Los Angeles to Copenhagen. A dogged, resourceful individual begins an investigation into a single event, and uncovers an increasingly complex web of corruption and wrongdoing. The second half of the book, set on the ship or on the island of Gela Alta, is more reminiscent of a standard thriller, with Smilla, in danger from ruthless villains and not knowing whom she can trust, desperately trying to unearth the secret at the heart of the mystery.

In some ways Smilla is a not very appealing heroine. She seems cold and unemotional and can be appallingly rude and sarcastic. On the other hand, she is courageous, determined and has a strong sense of justice- another similarity with the private eye heroes of film noir, who often hid a code of honour and a determination to see justice done beneath a surface veneer of world-weary cynicism. For all her surface coldness, Smilla seems to have an extraordinary ability to persuade people to help her in her task when they have no obligation to do so, and even when to do so would involve them in breaking the law. (At times this ability struck me as rather unrealistic- I kept waiting to see who would be the next person to come forward and offer her their assistance).

The book has some interesting points to make about the native Inuit people of Greenland and the way in which their traditional way of life has been affected by Danish colonialism. The descriptions of wintery Copenhagen and of the Arctic snow and ice are very atmospheric. Despite this, however, I am rather surprised by the extravagant praise which the book has attracted, both on this site and from outside reviewers. The reviews quoted in the publicity material include comparisons with Melville and Conrad, which seemed to me to be exaggerated- a closer comparison might be a sort of Alistair MacLean for intellectuals. Although it follows the traditional MacLean-style thriller in structure, Hoeg's novel does not really succeed as such. The plot is excessively complex and the pace of the book is too slow moving, often slowed down by the weight of the author's intellectual interests. (Besides the physics of snow and ice, the Greenlandic language and parasitology play important roles). Like a number of others, I found the ending unconvincing, when Hoeg finally reveals the nature of the "McGuffin" for the sake of which the voyage to Greenland has been undertaken. I must say that I preferred August's film, which simplified the plot and had a more satisfactory pace.

If you are looking for a stylistic novelty, try this book. The plots develops beautifully and if you do not know that it is a whodunit (which I didn't) it grasps you immensely. It gives the same stylistic satisfaction that Arundhati Roy's "God of Small Things" does.

I did not care very much about the random ending. However, the detachment of the main character and its existence as a social misfit was a big hit with me.