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Smilla's Sense of Snow

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Overview

She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love.She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land.And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime... It happened in the Copenhagen snow.A six-year-old boy, a Greenlander like Smilla, fell to his death from the top of his apartment building.While the boy's body is still warm, the police pronounce his death an accident.But Smilla knows her young neighbor didn't fall from the roof on his own.Soon she is following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.For her dead neighbor, and for herself, she must embark on a harrowing journey of lies, revelation and violence that will take her back to the world of ice and snow from which she comes, where an explosive secret waits beneath the ice....

Editorial Reviews

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.) -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Peter Hoeg

Peter Hoeg, is a writer. He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1957. Hoeg's first book, The History of Danish Dreams, was published in 1988. Another book, Smilla's Sense of Snow, received the Glass Key Award from the Crime Writers of Scandinavia in 1992. The book was made into a film in 1997 starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Bryne, and Vanessa Redgrave. 030

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Additional Info

Imprint

Rosetta Books

Filesize

1.29 MB

Number of Pages

480

eBook ISBN

9780795330261

Awards

  • Crime Writers' Association Awards
  • Dilys Award
  • Edgar Awards (Edgar Allan Poe Awards)

Excerpt from: Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg

It's freezing an extraordinary 0 Fahrenheit and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.

December darkness rises up from the grave, seeming as limitless as the sky above us. In this darkness our faces are merely pale, shining orbs, but even so I can sense the disapproval of the pastor and the verger directed at my black net stockings and at Juliane's whimpering, made worse by the fact that she took disulfiram this morning and is now confronting her grief almost sober. They think that she and I have no respect for either the weather or the tragic circumstances. But the truth is that both the stockings and the pills are each in their own way a tribute to the cold and to Isaiah.

The pastor and the verger and the women surrounding Juliane are all Greenlanders, and when we sing "Guutiga, illimi," "Thou, My Lord," and when Juliane's legs buckle under her and she starts to sob, the volume slowly increasing, and when the pastor speaks in West Greenlandic, taking his point of departure in the Moravians' favorite passage from Ephesians about redemption through His blood, then with only a tiny lapse of concentration you might feel yourself transported to Upernavik or Holsteinsborg or Qaanaaq in Greenland.

But out in the darkness, like the bow of a ship, the walls of Vestre Prison loom; we are in Copenhagen.

* * *

The Greenlanders' cemetery is part of Vestre Cemetery. A procession follows Isaiah in his coffin Juliane's friends, who are now holding her upright, the pastor and the verger, the mechanic, and a small group of Danes, among whom I recognize only the social worker and the investigator.

The pastor is now saying something that makes me think he must have actually met Isaiah, even though, as far as I know, Juliane has never gone to church.

Then his voice disappears, because now the other women are weeping along with Juliane.

Many have come, perhaps twenty, and now they let their sorrow wash over them like a black flood, into which they dive and let themselves be carried along in a way that no outsider could understand, no one who has not grown up in Greenland. And even that might not be enough. Because I can't follow them, either.