Smilla's Sense of Snow

ANNOTATION

Living in Copenhagen, childless, part-Eskimo Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen has only one real friend--her six-year-old neighbor Isaiah. When he's killed in a fall, Smilla doesn't believe it's an accident and decides to investigate--even though the police warn against it.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The title of this quiet, absorbing suspense novel by a Danish author only suggests the intriguing story it tells. After young Isaiah Christiansen falls from a snow-covered roof in present-day Copenhagen, something about his lone rooftop tracks--and the fact that the boy had a fear of heights--obsesses Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman who had befriended him. Smilla is 37, unmarried, and, like Isaiah, part of Denmark's small Eskimo/Greenlander community. She is also a minor Danish authority on the properties and classification of ice. Her search for what had frightened the boy leads her to uncover information about his father's mysterious death on a secret expedition to Greenland, a mission funded by a powerful Danish corporation involved in a strange conspiracy stretching back to WW II. As related in Smilla's sober, no-nonsense narration, the plot acquires credibility even as its details become more bizarre. While the novel will probably be compared to Gorky Park , Hoeg has much more to offer, both in terms of his impeccable literary style and in the glimpses he provides of an utterly foreign culture. Its chief virtue, however, is the narrator: Smilla is never less than believable in her contradictions--caustic, caring, thoughtful, impulsive, determined and above all, rebellious. Smoothly translated by Nunnally, this is Hoeg's third novel, but the first to appear in English. A dark, taut, compelling story, it's a real find. 40,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo; BOMC selection. (Sept.)

School Library Journal

YA-A compelling and suspenseful adventure about a solitary 37-year-old Greenlander, an unemployed glaciologist who lives in Copenhagen. Smilla Jaspersen is caught between the pull of her Inuit roots and the restrictions and demands of the modern industrial world. The story begins when her six-year-old neighbor falls from a snow-covered roof, and it is declared an accidental death. She and the boy were close friends, and she was keenly aware of his abnormal fear of heights. This, together with her keen Inuit understanding of snow, causes her to doubt that it was an accident. When she questions the local authorities they are not interested, and she begins to make inquiries on her own. Her investigation takes her from shipyards, corporate headquarters, and the dark back streets of the Danish capital to a secretive voyage along the icy Greenland coast. Mysterious characters, violent encounters, and an intriguing puzzle propel the story along. The final scenes rapidly accelerate in action and suspense. It's a rare thriller that has such a strong, fascinating female protagonist, but this book also excels in story and characterization. It's a winner.-Penny Stevens, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

BookList - Emily Melton

In his first novel to be published in English, Danish author Hoeg offers readers a wonderfully original, elegantly crafted, ominously savage story. The plot is cryptically clever, beginning with the death of a six-year-old boy and ending with the discovery of an international smuggling ring. The pervasive violence--both to the body and to the soul--is recounted so matter-of-factly as to be doubly chilling, and the characters are as mesmerizing, as enigmatic, and as engrossing as any populating the pages of recent crime fiction. But perhaps Hoeg's most wonderful invention is heroine Smilla Jaspersen, a rebellious, stubborn, tough, fearless Eskimo woman who's spent most of her life in Copenhagen. She has an uncanny sense of direction, a love of Isaac Newton's theories, and a gift for mathematics. She treasures her aloneness, successfully hiding her vulnerability under a near-impenetrable facade of aggressiveness--an aggressiveness that has caused her to be an outcast most of her life but that serves her well when she decides her six-year-old neighbor, Isaiah, did not die accidentally. Be forewarned that this is not an easy book to read. Its leaps and starts, from present to past to future, are confusing. Cryptic references and ambiguous, unexplained plot twists are often frustrating. But readers who persevere will be well rewarded. While the book may not appeal to mystery buffs looking only for pure entertainment, it is a must-read for serious fans of the genre.

Kirkus Reviews

Danish novelist Heg's first English-language publication is an attempt to freeze out Gorky Park by moving from an intimate mystery to an ever-widening circle of corruption and danger—and to even colder climes. Surly Inuit/Greenlander Smilla Jaspersen is a world-class expert on ice and snow who, since emigrating to Denmark, has gone on nine scientific expeditions to her homeland and published half a dozen highly regarded papers in scholarly journals—but she still can't hold a steady job. When Isaiah Christensen, her six-year-old downstairs neighbor with a long-standing fear of heights, plunges from the roof of the White Palace, their apartment building, Smilla presses for a police inquiry; but instead of a homicide detective, the police send an investigator from the fraud division. Why? Also, why did somebody perform a muscle biopsy on Isaiah after he died? What was he doing on that roof in the first place? And what does his death have to do with his father's death on an expedition to Greenland two years before—a death that, Smilla learns from extravagantly pious accountant Elsa L�bing, was recompensed by a full, unearned pension by the Cryolite Corporation? With the help of another neighbor, dyslexic mechanic Peter Fjl, Smilla follows a trail from the White Palace through the Cryolite records of a fateful (and fatal) 1966 expedition, and ends up aboard the Kronos, a smuggling ship stuffed with drugs and desperate characters and bound for Greenland's Barren Glacier and a truly unimaginable cargo. Smilla, a wonderfully tough-talking amateur sleuth, gets out past her depth aboard the Kronos when her shipmates keep trying to toss her overboard. But her combination of briskmisanthropy and shrewd commentary on the colonial exploitation of Greenland—yes, this is a postcolonial novel about the Arctic—could score big. (First printing of 40,000)