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

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Product:	Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Peter Hoeg
Date:	07/02/01 (208 review reads)
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Is it a good idea to see film versions of books? Yes, if the film is well made; what does it matter where the plot comes from? NO, NEVER, if you’ve read the book! How wonderful is it to imagine what the characters might look like, I can create my own fictitious world and people it with my own imaginary creatures.

But how can I possibly use my imagination, when I see an actor’s or an actress’s face in my mind’s eye whenever a name comes up? (A logical consequence of this is that a book made from a film is an absurdity and completely superfluous).

No, I haven’t mixed up the categories, I’m dealing with ‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow’. After my wise words at the beginning I must confess that I made the mistake to go and see the film after reading the book. I should have known better, or rather, I knew better already! Never again can I call back ‘my’ Smilla and that’s a pity because she’s someone very special and should forever remain an imaginary creature.

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The German translation was published for the first time in 1994 as a serious looking, expensive hardcover novel; the English translation, however, appeared already in a pocketbook edition in the same year with a sticker on the cover >Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger Award<.

What is more appropriate for Miss Smilla? The answer is: she fits into both categories, in fact, her whole character is defined by ‘not only, but also’.

She spent her childhood in an igloo together with her Eskimo mother, a famous hunter of seals throughout Greenland and, after her mother’s death, was taken to Copenhagen by her Danish father, a famous and rich anaesthetist. What might such a woman look like? Certainly not like Julia Ormond with her big round eyes and pointed nose who moves in fro
nt of ‘my’ Smilla whenever I want to conjure her up.

Although Smilla has remained a Greenlander in her heart, she acknowledges the advantages of the more convenient Danish life. She lives on welfare, but is always elegantly and expensively dressed. She gets the money from her father, who calms down his bad conscience by signing cheques, and from writing articles for scientific magazines. She hasn’t passed an exam, but is nevertheless a renowned glaciologist. The things Smilla doesn’t know about ice and snow aren’t worth knowing.

She’s rude, gruff, cheeky. Especially when someone gets too close in a friendly way she puts up her spikes, if you need a comparison: more like a porcupine than a hedgehog. Why she keeps on snubbing is something I haven’t really understood, obviously she experienced her transferral to Denmark as an abduction and now takes revenge on the world in general.

Yet she is very sensitive and warm-hearted, too; as I‘ve already said, she is of the ‘not only - but also’ kind. The story begins when a six-year-old boy from Greenland who lived with his mother in Smilla’s house falls off the roof and dies. As he was suffering from extreme vertigo (he used to climb up the stairs to the third floor on his hands and knees!) and the footprints in the snow seem rather odd to the expert, she doesn’t believe that he went onto the roof voluntarily or even committed suicide. She loved the boy and her Greenland soul won’t calm down until his death hasn’t been cleared up completely, so she decides to examine the mysterious circumstances on her own initiative.

The farther she gets with her investigations, the more dangerous her life becomes. But she doesn’t know who or what she’s stirred up. When she finds a cassette in the dead boy’s hiding place with a man’s voice on it which describes a route through the ice in a dial
ect typical for the North of Greenland she feels she might hold the first clue in her hands. She takes it to a specialist for Eskimo dialects, but when she comes back after a short phone call she finds him stabbed, the boat he lives on explodes and she escapes death by drowning only by the skin of her teeth.

It becomes more and more obvious that the solution of the mysterious case can only be found in Greenland. The boy’s father died there in an explosion, which happened while he was working for a Danish mining company. But where’s the connection between his death and the murder of his son in Copenhagen years later? And murder it was, Smilla is sure of that now. When the mining company fits out a new ship Smilla succeeds in getting the job of a stewardess on board and sets out for Greenland. There she gets to know the most incredible things and we’re right in the middle of a story about greed, lust for power and dreams of omnipotence.

The plot of the novel is ingenious, the representation fascinating. My only complaint is that I could do with some abridgements here and there, the description of the inside of the ship is far too elaborate, for example. Although a very critical reader in general I can buy without problems that Miss Smilla is capable of making profound philosophical remarks in the most dangerous situations, this realistic novel has some traits of the fairy tale, too. Even in the translation we feel the power of Hoeg’s prose, he fuses the laconic and the poetic.

The author holds us in his grip like the ice the ship!

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‘Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow’ fulfils all criteria for a feminist thriller. I’m going to bet away my whole library though, that no reader would suspect - without looking at the cover - that the female first-person narrator was created by a man. That backs up my conviction: Ther
e is no male or female literature, only good and bad one.

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Peter Hoeg
Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow
Flamingo
UK 5.99

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