It's the first decade of the 21st century. A chill, icy wind blows in from the North, carrying with it a sociopolitical narrative of lands British and American observers have long idealized as incorporating the social democratic ideal. The icy wind that hits American shores howls through us, unprepared as we are, and dismantles one by one our precious concept of a world region that we have lazily lumped together into a bucket named Scandinavia. We shiver.This first decade of a new century has brought us this cold narrative that slowly shows us the errors of our ways. There is no Scandinavia: there are individual nations that show up remarkably pronounced. Sweden is not the only Scandinavian country: there is Norway, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Finland. The largest nation in the region, Sweden, has no imperialistic motives: but the smallest does. There is no such thing as an Eskimo: there are Yupic and Inuit peoples.And so intelligent readers of this frozen Nordic narrative will pause and reconsider their own fondly held preconceptions and biases and weigh them against this unfamiliar and foreign influx that has hit our shores. I say unfamiliar because not only are both British and American readers donning their down jackets and huddling together while reading and discussing political and cultural dimensions previously not known to them, but they do so while reading crime-fiction.Americans, especially, do not normally look toward crime-fiction for their own political and societal enlightenment. So we have a problem. For like it or not, there's no editorializing from our Scandinavian friends. Laying aside commercial considerations which of course play a part, our Nordic friends are making a mass of unfamiliar material available and are not afraid to experiment and slant, and bend and crack their medium of choice in order to deliver their sociopolitical insights via crime-fiction. And they do it without frustrating the appeal of popular fiction. And in the publishing world, they do so at the frustration and exasperation of British and American crime-fiction authors.To give a measure to this chilly invasion we can consider the late Stieg Larsson, undoubtedly the best selling author both here in the States and at home. Most readers of the crime-fiction genre (and even those outside of it) will recognize the name immediately, in part thanks to the Millennium motion pictures. The years 2008, 2009, and 2010 mark a new Millennium for American readers: Lisbeth Salander is a household name in America. And yet, in spite of Larsson's best-selling status, his work does not represent the tip of the iceberg. Larsson's novels do not represent the ice storm that precedes the cold winds that follow.That heralded status belongs to Peter Hoeg: his novel may be the first sign of this iceberg as seen from the top of the vessel's mast; the fountainhead of our Nordic invasion is Smilla's Sense of Snow. Hoeg made us take notice of what was to come in this first decade of our new century. This book has the distinction of opening the American and British floodgates to Nordic waters and to this gigantic mass of ice hidden beneath the sea's surface of which it alone is the very tip.This single novel epitomizes the Nordic invasion: it experiments with literary language, bends point of view, upsets narration, gives immediancy to tense, offers sociopolitical insights and does so while remaining faithful to popular fiction, by being wedded to an exquisite murder mystery.And so it is 1996 and the ice storm hits our shores in the form of an unlikely heroine named Smilla Jaspersen. It'll take a few years for the book and its consequent cinematic version to gain an American audience. But it is the tip of the iceberg from which erupts an unexpected Nordic invasion throughout the following decade.What happens when we open the book?First a note as to translation: Tiina Nunnally does an extraordinary job translating this from Danish.Within the first few pages we realize 3 things all at once. A) Peter Hoeg is not your workaday mystery writer, and B) we will be reading a literary mystery, and C) we are likely to be intimate with our heroine as the book is written in 1st person, present tense (not exactly American mainstream crime-fiction fare).We can draw several conclusions from this without reading any further. If you like fast moving, plot/action mysteries you will likely give this book a lower rating. If you are a literary romanticist and bump up against Smilla, and are given the cold shoulder Inuit style you will likely give this book a lower rating as well. Nordic crime-fiction contains recurring themes: Nazi collaboration, difficult childhoods, corrupt statesmen, dark immigrant stories and in this Smilla's Sense of Snow opens the door to such insights viA the mind of Peter Hoeg who is not afraid to experiment with the genre for which he writes. Some American readers will find it annoying that Hoeg interrupts the beautiful narrative with a mystery. But here too, Hoeg is following Scandinavian tradition by not editorializing, by his exploration of Danish and Inuit social and cultural issues: by writing crime-fiction first and foremost.It's a cold book. It opens to the first paragraph.It's freezing - an extraordinary 0 degrees 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.The book fore spells a bone-chilling frost. Hoeg immediately makes a reference to the deep sociopolitical analysis to come: Smilla is not Danish and her language of birth has been taken from her. True to Scandinavian form, Hoeg then promptly engages us in the murder.Isaiah is laying with his legs tucked up under him, with his face in the snow and his hands around his head, as if he were shielding himself from the little spotlight shining on him, as if the snow were a window through which he has caught sight of something deep inside the earth.Everything that follows is nothing short of brilliance. Within these two paragraphs lies a secret spanning an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark and the frozen Arctic seas north, if not the farthest reaches of space. Through the exquisite narration of an ice expert (and I do mean: exquisite) - Smilla, an Inuit scientist; Smilla a THule woman imbued with heartfelt but frozen emotion; Smilla, a human being endowed with extraordinary intellect; Smilla, a native woman who steps into the 21st century as if from a recorded norse saga; Smilla, wildly deceptive as she emerges through Hoeg's fingers - through this narrative we embark on a frightening and mysterious journey lodged between an opening and an ending. "Smilla. Why is it that such an elegant and petite girl like you has such a rough voice?" "I'm sorry," I say, "if I give you the impression that it's only my mouth that's rough. I do my best to be rough all over."Smilla adopts a particular way of regarding the world. She was created in beauty and is a chain of force. Evil surrounds her. It is cloaked in crystalline attraction. And as we turn invariably toward Hoeg's conclusion she will find our villain Tørk waiting...Listen to Smilla as she tells you her story.
This was the third book I took with me for the Second Annual Cat-Sitting event at my brother's place. He has the unfortunate luck of having his birthday in the middle of August, the hottest time of the year, and he goes off to have adventures with his lady-friend, giving me the opportunity to sit in his very hot house that does not have air conditioning to keep an eye on his cats, take advantage of his streaming Netflix, and read until my eyes bleed.Last year one of the books I took with me was the absolutely gorgeous Canadian book, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston. That was a good book to read because it was about Newfoundland and they have snow in Newfoundland. You know who doesn't have snow in the middle of August? My brother's place in Pittsburgh. So it was nice to read about snow last year when I was otherwise dying from heatstroke.This year I brought along this book, not because it was about snow (at least not intentionally), but because it's been on my bookshelf for-freaking-ever and I don't even know why I haven't read it already. The cover claims it was the Best Book of the Year. This book came out in the early 90s, around the time I was probably still busy reading V.C. Andrews and Anne Rice's vampire books with all the same level of interest and anticipation.The story starts with a six-year-old boy who dies after a fall from the top of the apartment building where he lived. Smilla has known the boy for a while as she also lives in the apartment building and sort of befriends the tyke as his own mother is not fit to be a mother. The police are all like "Accident!" but Smilla is all like "Bullshit!" because there's nothing about the scene that makes it look like this kid died from an accident.It's okay, though, Smilla will figure it out.This was a highly readable and interesting book, and now I'm going to piss everyone off by comparing Smilla to another female protagonist that I have previously said I couldn't fucking stand: Lisbeth Salander.Yes, that Lisbeth that you all know and love from the Millennium Trilogy. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Who Played With Fire While Kicking the Hornets' Nest girl.Guess what, everyone - Peter Høeg wrote about Lisbeth before she was Lisbeth. And (gasp) he did it better. This is all a matter of opinion, of course, but let me share my opinion since you're here.Smilla is just as stand-offish and strange and socially awkward as Lisbeth. What's different in the way Høeg wrote Smilla compared to how Larsson wrote Lisbeth is I feel Høeg actually respected Smilla. He wrote a character with an entire backstory that felt believable, and therefore her actions in her late 30s felt more believable as well. Høeg appears to actually care about Smilla in a way that I never felt Larsson felt for Lisbeth - in that case, Lisbeth was a vehicle for the author's fantasy of what a woman would be: tough, brilliant, and hot.Smilla is all of those things as well (oh, and she's more fashionable, not that that means anything, just throwing it out there), except it didn't feel like Høeg was drooling all over her every time he put her on the page. She felt separate from the author, able to do what she wanted, rather than what the author wanted her to do (to him). It felt more natural. Smilla has flaws in ways Larsson never allowed Lisbeth to have flaws, and you know what it is about flaws in a character that is important? It makes the real.All that being said, there are other similarities between the Millennial books and this one, there's this whole thriller aspect. I found even that more readable here than those other books which I read out of obligation, really, rather than any real desire to read them. I had a desire to finish this one.I found myself frustrated in some of the same ways - oh, here's Smilla to save the day! Oh, with just a look she can make some bad man cower and spill all the secrets. I mean, I'm told I have a pretty withering look myself sometimes, but I'm not even as good as Smilla or Lisbeth. They are in a class of their own.Høeg is a surprisingly knowledgeable writer. If you look up his history, he's pretty much done it all: Sailor, ballet dancer, actor, and he's dabbled in fencing and mountaineering. And now he's a writer. It's actually sort of hot, being all Danish and accomplished like that. It's sort of like when we all found out that hot Aragorn actor can also write poetry, is a photographer, musician, and a painter, and oh yeah, also speaks like fifteen languages.Aragorn is also Danish. For the love of god, Danes, what is in your drinking water? Why do your men-folk even bother putting on clothes?Høeg uses his past experience as a sailor in this book and it's not even too-Melville-ian for my taste. There's a lot of talk about ice and snow and ships and more ice and more snow, and instead of it being a drag to read it was like I was reading about what ice and snow must be like, as if I have never experienced either before. That's a pretty talented writer, to make me feel like I'm new to the whole ice and snow thing.There were passages in this book that knocked my socks off. I made several status updates here and probably alienated all of my friends because there were so many. Thanks for sticking with me, team. They really were just so, so good.There was also this sex scene that... I can't even.I can't give this a full five stars because I don't know why, but I thought this was a pretty solid read. I was a bit hesitant at first - oh, god, another guy writing from a woman's perspective, how awful will this be. It turned out to not be as bad as I was expecting. It wasn't perfect, but way better than that Larsson guy.
What do You think about Smilla's Sense Of Snow (1995)?
Stylistically, it's not terrible. By which I mean, I suppose, that at the paragraph level the writing is pretty good. But, as cultural commentary it's a pretty blunt instrument. As a character sketch, it's not really in touch with how humans think and act. As a mystery, it's poorly crafted. And -- very significantly -- we {{OMG HERE COMES THE SPOILER!!!}} wade through a lot of brooding realism to end up, four hundred pages later, at The Attack of the Space Worms. Now I'm not against Space Worms
—Michael
Miss Smilla and her cast of characters were so quirky that after 100 pages I found all this quirk over the front of my shirt, all over the dining table (well, I call it a dining table) and stuck between the keys on my keyboard. Had to get it out with a Swiss Army knife, once it had dried. Sent a sample off to the lab and the results came back "two parts David Lynch, three parts frankly unbelievable heroine, three parts uninvolving plot which moves at the speed of an exhausted glacier". As I thought.
—Paul Bryant
I've seen this title in multiple languages on the sidebar of the BookCrossing website so many times, and it's always intrigued me. In speaking with a friend recently, she mentioned a guy who hated it so much that he burned a copy of it, and neither of us could imagine feeling that strongly about a book! Thus, when she got her hands on a copy, she said she'd share it with me too :)And although I'd have liked a more "concrete" ending, I have to say this book held my attention from the beginning. I love the idea of having a 'sense of snow', and someone from Greenland just being able to stand the cold longer than ... well, I could. I like to read books "cold". That is, without a lot of knowledge about them going into it. I don't really like to be swayed by what I know about an author or a book before I read it. It's easier to form my own opinion about a book if I just sit down and read it. However, because of that, I'm sometimes confused by odd things :) For instance, I'm pretty sure that this wasn't originally written in English, nor by an American. But oddly enough, the characters in this book talk about the IRS. My guess? That it's the Danish (or Greenlandic) version of our Internal Revenue Service they're talking about, and the translator chose to translate it to "IRS". But I don't have to like it :)On the other hand, there are some things in this book that either translate really well, or the translator changed altogether. I can't imagine that Prohibition as we know/picture it in the U.S. was the same there (or existed at all), but this description was great: He's short, no taller than I am, but he's wearing a very large gray coat with so much padding in the shoulders that he looks like a ten-year-old boy acting in a musical about Prohibition.In a world where half the people I know are vegetarians and another half are vegans, I loved this part: I eat mostly meat. Fatty meat. I can't keep warm on vegetables and bread.There are a lot of insights (Smilla's) into the human condition in this book. I found this one profound: There's not a single human being who doesn't find it a relief to be forced to tell the truth. [An unnamed, un"spoiled" character:] is not a natural liar.This book required more brainpower than I expected, and I found the intrigue ... well, intriguing :) I liked it, although I'd have liked a little bit more "meat" for the ending.
—Antof9
