Incorruptible Ice (Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Peter Hoeg)

Member Name: MagdaDH

Product:	Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Peter Hoeg
Date:	09/03/06 (1131 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: fascianting, beautiful, fun

Disadvantages: the techno-thriller resolution and action sequences might disappoint some readers

I rarely read translations now I read almost exclusively in English: the world of literature, pop-fiction and non-fiction in English is so huge and varied that with all the time in the world one would not mange to explore it; so no wonder translations seem often just a spurious extra.

And yet, every so often, a translated book crops up on my reading list and virtually every time it happens the result is my wondrous astonishment. From Italian to Russian to French to Danish they seem - well, different. I cannot exactly pinpoint why, it might be the question of language which even in translation retains some memory of the original rhythm, melody and structure; or is it a culture from which the writer comes from , or a different prose tradition the writer taps into.

"Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow" is, indeed, a translation: originally written in Danish and taking place exclusively in Denmark (Copenhagen and Greenland to be precise).

It's a strange book, not only because of its subject and the main character, but most of all because it very much straddles genres, or to be more precise, it straddles the border between a genre (essentially a thriller) and so called mainstream. I don't recall any other book I have read that had so many genre ingredients (a mystery death, a lone outsider investigating it, dynamic action sequences of fighting and destruction, techno-thriller resolution) which read so much as mainstream 'literature'.

It's beautifully written, with deepish psychological analysis, evocative description and interesting points to make. The combination really worked for me - "Miss Smilla" is an exciting read but it also made me think (I also bought the book and re-read it within couple of months of first reading).

Miss Smilla of the title is a daughter of a famous Danish doctor who fell for a Greenlander woman hunter. She spent formative years of her life in Greenland but then, after her mother's death, lived in Denmark with her father; never integrated, never truly adapted, never really home. Half a Greenlander, half a Dane, pulled out of her mother's culture at 12 she is - in fact - alienated form both, she cannot kill animals but she cannot, not really, live in the world where mechanical order stands between Smilla and her perfect feeling for snow; the communion with Absolute Space which gives her grounding in reality, makes disoriented and ill at sea and such an excellent navigator on land.

She is a scientist though she never completed a degree, she is well-off but lives more from her father's guilt cheques than from any income she earns. But above all she has an amazing, uncanny feeling for ice and snow. In Smilla the natural instinct, traditional Greenlander knowledge and the modern science of glaciology combines to produce somebody who knows pretty much everything there is to know about snow and ice. It's not just cold intellectual knowledge, either.

Ice is important for Smilla in a deep, emotional way, not only as her link with the Greenland roots, but also on a deeply spiritual plane, as a connection to the Absolute Space, as her grounding in the Universe, as the proof that, despite all the technology, and all the sophistication, and all the corruption of the Western civilisation, there is still the ultimate, unsubjugated, incorruptible nature that can remove our technological creations in a blink of an eye.

Smilla lives in an apartment in Copenhagen, in one of these blocks unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world 'when only the better off or those supported by the state can afford. She befriends Jonah, a child of an alcoholic Greenlander mother whose father died in and expedition accident few years before. One day, Jonah feels off the roof of the building on which he climbed despite being intensely scared of heights. This is officially classified as accident, but Smilla is not convinced and starts her own investigation that will take her to pathologists and policemen, tax inspectors and retired accountants, casino-owning shipping magnates and Inuit linguists; and from Copenhagen to Greenland. Isaiah's death gives Smilla sense of purpose and is a vehicle for her finding herself and trying to work out who she is, finding her true nature.

In the course of the story we will learn a lot about Smilla's past and her current personality; but also encounter descriptions of many other characters, social groups and place. These are sometimes very brief but always uncannily convincing, at least to somebody as ignorant of Danishness as me. There is also a love story, somehow strange but touching, sad but satisfactory, ultimately humane and grown up.

So, it's a book about Smilla, her character and temperament, foibles and habits - and what made her the person she is. It's a book about Greenlanders and the Danish, too, and it's full of fascinating information on how these groups interact and perceive each other. It don't know how realistic the portrayal is, it certainly seems so, but it might be just Smilla's perspective after all, and despite her being a half-Dane and privileged (educated and with money) she emotionally identifies with the colonised rather than the colonisers. Despite appreciating the comforts of technology and being fluent in the language of science, Smilla's heart lies firmly on the side of nature.

And finally, and perhaps most interestingly for me, it's a book about the conflict and opposition that often define the biggest dilemmas of life (and philosophy), between nature and civilisation, primitive and ancient way of life and feeling and the technological one. The differences are fundamental: they go deep, the basic notions of time and space: mathematics and the meter model in Paris versus distance measured in sleeps. I think Smilla is a Greenlander not only because Greenland was colonised by the Danes. She is also a Greenlander because it's very handy for the big issue the novel is concerned with, because the world of ice and snow is still pretty much unconquered and uncorrupted. Smilla looks at an installation of a floating port in Greenland and thinks "It has been all created with a goal of coercion in mind (...) what they want to coerce is the Other, the vastness, that which surrounds the human beings. It's the sea, the earth, the ice."

Smilla is the exemplification of this conflict: it runs through her and it is the main reason for her un-rootedness. She is unrooted not only because she is an ice-fixated Greenlander living in Copenhagen. She is also unrooted because she is rational enough to know that she cannot go back, not innocently at least. That despite eating the souls of the people, technological civilisation provides undisputed benefits: "the problem with being able to hate the colonisation of Greenland with a pure hatred is that, no matter what you might detest about it, the colonisation irrefutably improved material needs of an existence that was one of the most difficult in the world (...) the Inuit very rarely die of hunger nowadays"

She is never accepted but never accepting either, an outsider, a suspicious and inquisitive outsider in a fondly dismissed society of gullible truth deniers (or is it just the way Smilla sees the Danes?); and all these prejudices get confirmed in the story where the authorities, the business and a few powerful and influential figures collude in a plot powered by greed and power hunger.

I loved this book, for its multiple layers of meaning, for its beautiful descriptions, for the mixture of the exotic and the familiar. For snow and ice, which are after all, frozen water; and it's in the power of sea I find the incorruptible for which Smilla loves ice.

Definitely recommended, borrow or buy it if you haven't read it yet. It can be read as a thriller, can be read as a psychological analysis or even (OK, at a push) as a philosophical parable.

The version I read was translated by Felicity David. There is also another version, in Tiina Nunnally's translation, titled "Smilla's Sense of Snow". I would throughly recommend the version I read as it read wonderfully. I have a strong belief that in great majority of cases the translator should be the native speaker of the language he/she is translating into, and it seems that Ms David is more likely to be a native speaker; plus her title sounds much better!

416 pages; available for £7.79 on Amazon, from 0.01 in the marketplace - I bought it on eBay for less than £2 with postage.

Summary: An uprooted Greenlander investigates mysterious death and ponders on the nature-civilisation divide