Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
UK hardback first edition
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| Author | Peter Høeg |
|---|---|
| Original title | Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne |
| Translator | Tiina Nunnally |
| Country | Denmark |
| Language | Danish |
| Genre | Murder mystery |
| Publisher | Rosinante |
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Publication date
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1992 |
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Published in English
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1993 (Harvill Press, UK) |
| Media type | Hardback |
| Pages | 435 |
| ISBN | |
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow or Smilla's Sense of Snow (Danish: Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne) is a 1992 novel by Danish author Peter Høeg. It was translated into English by Tiina Nunnally (credited as "F. David" in the British edition).
During her Greenland childhood Smilla developed an almost intuitive understanding of all types of snow and their characteristics. As an adult she worked for a time as a scientist whose speciality was snow and ice. Her certainty about the manner of a child’s death is due to this visceral “feeling for snow”.
The novel is ostensibly a work of detection and a thriller, although beneath the surface of the novel, Høeg is concerned with rather deeper cultural issues, particularly Denmark's curious post-colonial history, and also the nature of relationships that exist between individuals and the societies in which they are obliged to operate. The protagonist Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen is a sympathetic and useful vehicle in this respect, her deceased mother being Greenlandic Inuit and her father a rich Danish doctor.
Having been brought in childhood from the poverty and freedom of Greenland to the affluent and highly ordered society of Denmark, Smilla's relationship with Denmark and Danish society is strained and ambivalent. Smilla investigates the death of a neighbour’s child whom she had befriended—a fellow Greenlander, with an alcoholic, neglectful mother and a mysteriously deceased father. The story begins in Copenhagen, where the child has fallen to his death from the snowy rooftop of an old warehouse. The police refuse to consider it anything but an accident—there is only one set of footprints (the child's) in the snow leading to the edge of the roof—but Smilla believes there is something about the footprints that shows that the boy was chased off the roof. Her investigations lead her to decades-old conspiracies in Copenhagen, and then to a voyage on an icebreaker ship to a remote island off the Greenlandic coast, where the truth is finally discovered. But the book ends unresolved, with no firm conclusion.
An important role in the first part of the book is played by a linguist who has a thorough knowledge of the various Inuit languages and dialects, as well as the various variations of Danish, and can tell the precise background of both Greenlanders and Danes when hearing them speak - a literary descendant of George Bernard Shaw's Professor Higgins.
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