Smilla's Sense of Snow/Panelės Smilos sniego jausmas (original 1992; edition 1995)

Danish novelist Heg's first English-language publication moves from an intimate mystery to an ever-widening circle of corruption and danger--and to even colder climes. Surly Inuit/Greenlander Smilla Jaspersen is a world-class expert on ice and snow who, since emigrating to Denmark, has gone on nine scientific expeditions to her homeland and published half a dozen highly regarded papers in scholarly journals--but she still can't hold a steady job. Isaiah Christensen, her six-year-old downstairs neighbor with a long-standing fear of heights, plunges from the roof of the White Palace, 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. With the help of another neighbor, dyslexic mechanic Peter Fjl, Smilla follows a trail from the White Palace through the Cryolite records of a fateful (and fatal) 1966 expedition, and ends up aboard the Kronos, a smuggling ship stuffed with drugs and desperate characters and bound for Greenland's Barren Glacier and a truly unimaginable cargo. ( )

In Copenhagen one day during a cold December Smilla Jaspersen was on her way home. She comes upon the scene of the death of her young neighbor and friend six year old Isaiah. Like herself, this young boy is of mixed heritage a combination of Dane and Greenlander. Isaiah’s mother is an alcoholic who leaves Isaiah to fend for him most of the time so he has struck up some friendships in his apartment building and had become close to Smilla.
Apparently he was on the roof of a nearby warehouse and fell to his death. Smilla is aware that the boy is afraid of heights and she inspects the roof, which has no footprints other than Isaiah’s, which at one point lead from the center right over edge. Smilla who can read snow knows that Isaiah was frightened off of the roof. She asks for a investigation and sets in motion a set of events that will take her to the edge of the world and to her own near extinction.
She begins to get some intimations of the complexities involved when she finds out that a deep muscle biopsy was done on Isaiah’s thigh and when she begins to learn more about Isaiah who was being tracked by high powered lawyers and others. This seems to be related to the death of the boy’s father several years before.
Smilla lost her mother to the sea when she was young and she began to feel alienation toward nature. She began then to want to understand the ice in an attempt to recapture what she had lost. She subsequently learned all there was to know about snow and ice.
Smilla understands better now that she is older that freedom of choice is an illusion, that life leads us through a series of bitter, involuntary repetitive confrontations with problems that we haven’t resolved. The mystery is why was the death of one small boy so important to important people who tentacles reach back into Greenland’s exploration of the past 60 years.
( )

wow so many editions and the one I have isn't in there. Mine is a Flamingo ed. 1994
1 of 25 books bought today for $10 (the lot).

I liked the book (for the real review see the Dutch edition). It was on the wishlist of one of my birthday buddies on VC, and I thought it might be nice to get her a copy.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/journal/8303956 ( )

I enjoyed this book more than any book in a long time. It is hard to describe. Sort of a murder mystery, sort of a technothriller. Definitely not boring enough to be literary, and not believable enough, in my opinion, to be a fully satisfying mystery—but intensely thoughtful and well-written.

Part of the fun of reading this book is unraveling the narrator herself. There is no paragraph on page two summarizing Smilla Jaspersen’s background. You gather immediately that she is a defiant, razor-sharp Greenlander living in Copenhagen, but it takes longer to understand the events of her life that have brought her to her present condition. Once you gain some illumination, she is already so real that the explanations seem almost pale. She is not strictly likeable, but I loved reading about her.

The writing is terse, and the simple sentence structure becomes a little too predictable. But this lends itself to some surprising moments of goofy, deadpan humor, where you’re not quite sure at first that it’s supposed to be funny, and then you realize there is no way it’s not supposed to be funny. I kept laughing out loud.

I liked the beginning of the book best, when you are trying to figure out who Smilla is and what is going on. There is a romance element that I found quite charming. About halfway through events got so complex and unbelievable to me that I stopped trying to figure it all out, but it was still hard to stop reading. I think there were some things that weren’t satisfyingly explained or developed.

One of the interesting things about this book for me was how it dealt with the idea of cultural identity. How people see themselves is endlessly complicated, and I was curious, upon discovering this book for sale at the library, to find out how a fictional Greenlander living in Denmark saw the world. In real life, there are people who seem to oversimplify their cultural identity. Then there are people who are never quite sure where they fit in. You can decide for yourself how to describe Smilla.

I’ll leave you with a longish excerpt that shows you how blunt and opinionated she is, with a touch of bittersweetness.

At the university they had a lot of funny ethnological clichés. One of them was about how much European mathematics was indebted to ancient folk culture; just look at the pyramids, whose geometry commands respect and admiration.
This, of course, is idiocy disguised as a pat on the back. Technological culture is superior in the very reality it defines. The seven to eight rules of thumb of the Egyptian surveyors is abacus mathematics compared to integral calculus.
…
Any race of people that allows itself to be graded on a scale designed by European science will appear to be a culture of higher primates.
Any grading system is meaningless. Every attempt to compare cultures with the intention of determining which is the most developed will never be anything other than one more bullshit projection of Western culture’s hatred of its own shadows.
There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it. When I start talking about Qaanaaq, to myself or to others, I again start to lose what has never been truly mine. ( )