Sehr spannender Schrott wie ich finde.: Es scheint ja die unterschiedlichsten Motivationen zu geben ein Buch zu lesen. Die einen wollen den Film lesen, den sie gerade gesehen haben. Die anderen wollen dem Schriftsteller erklären, was der geneigte Leser lesen möchte. Die dümmsten Vertreter (oder Einzelhandelskaufleute?) jedoch bezeichnen sich als Literaturinteressierte und glauben, dass sie damit ihre Umwelt mit Tipps belästigen dürfen.
Fräulein Smilla ist wie andere Romane von Hoeg bestimmt nicht leicht lesbare Kost. Der Stil ist gewöhnungsbedürftig, manchmal schlicht (könnte das einen Bezug zum Inhalt haben?), nie effektheischend und letztlich aber immer passend zu dem, was erzählt wird. Welche Zeitform dabei verwendet wird, mag ja nun Nebensache sein, auch wenn wir in der Schule gelernt haben "Erzählzeit=Präteritum". Manchmal macht ja genau das den Reiz aus: dass nicht alles so ist, wie wir es erwarten. Und dieser Effekt gehört zu einem Kriminalroman wie Schweigen zu einem Dummkopf.
Achja, Kriminalroman. Smilla ist bestimmt keiner der reinen Sorte. Ein Reiseführer für Grönland ist es aber gewiss auch nicht. Die zahlreichen Schilderungen nehmen den offenen Leser gefangen und ebenso wie die Eindrücke, die man von der außerordentlich starken Hauptfigur bekommt, lassen sie einen so schnell nicht los. Die Bezüge, die Hoeg setzt, strengen an, jedenfalls denjenigen, der sich darauf einlässt.
Fazit: wer es nicht kaufen möchte, braucht es nicht. Es gibt Bibliotheken und Büchereien. Man kann es anlesen und dann entscheiden. Man kann es auch mit dem "Plan zur Abschaffung der Dunkelheit" von Hoeg probieren.
Wer mit dem Buch, nicht zurecht kommt, muss nicht das Buch dafür verantwortlich machen, geschweige denn den Schriftsteller, denn "wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammen stoßen, und es klingt hohl - liegt das dann am Buch?"
Reinlesen....;)

I disliked this book. I thought the writer was aiming for a movie deal, and the characters and events were predictable and dull. Way too much time spent describing her outfits. ( )

This book was very poetically written, and a lot of the language was plain old gorgeous. I liked Smilla, by and large, and I especially enjoyed how the mechanic had the same first name as the author. (There was another mor minor character named Mr. Hoeg as well.)However, I had a lot of trouble with this book. Starting about halfway through I began having a really hard time following the plot. I don't know if I was just too distracted to catch on or what, but in the end I still wasn't entirely clear what was going on or why anybody was doing anything. What's more, I still don't really get what happened to Isaiah or what the deal with the meteor was. Maybe the author was trying to leave things open for a sequel, I don't know. Anyway, the writing was refreshing and I'm glad I read it, even if I did lose track of the plot along the way. ( )

I had heard alot of hype about this quirky, well-written mystery - unfortunately for me, it did not live up to the hype. It is mostly set in Copenhagen, with the latter portions revolving around an icy boat trip to a glacier. Smilla, our ballsy female protagonist, is a half-Inuit odd-ball of a woman, whose only passion appears to be the math and science behind ice and snow. One night she just happens to arrive on scene of what appears to be an accident where her 6 yr old neighbor has fallen from a roof to his death; she then involves herself in proving he was murdered.

It sounds interesting, but I just found most of it fairly dull. Alot of skipping around vaguely between pseudoscience, Smilla's childhood in Greenland, and lots of characters that seemed to blend together. Smilla was so odd as to be unrealistic - to me it was clear that a male was trying to write from a female character's perspective; it was somehow off. I really disliked the jarring present tense narration -- this just feels gimmicky to me and is very distracting. This was one of those books that you get stuck often reading the same sentence over and over again. Some of the prose regarding the ice and the science behind it, especially when they arrived on the glacier was really empiricly quite good though, and the cold forboding atmosphere on the ship was well-done. But in the end, the 'big reveals' seemed well, almost comical to me -- rather ridiculous - and not worth wading through the other #400 pages of the novel.

I can see why some people would like this - the author is clearly talented and intelligent, and maybe one could think of Smilla as edgy and the writing "hip," but to me it was not a well-crafted mystery as it was NOT a page-turner. It felt very contrived and I hate to say it but, pretentious as well. A generous 3 stars. ( )

An action-adventure-thriller with a lot material crammed into it. A great read, but not for the busy reader. The main mystery is refreshingly scientific and supported by a lot of bio- and geological detail. The plot is revealed very slowly and in short pieces -- I had to browse back and forth to keep track of all the clues. The writing is quite dense and the main storyline is interrupted by sociological analysis of the conflicts between Denmark and Greenland -- between nature (Eskimos) and a modern techno-society. I think that is the main theme in the book, it reappears in the dialogue and even the stucture of the book.

The book is very captivating and makes you think of a variety of things. It starts as a murder mystery, then slowly the action intensifies as the mystery and the stories of the characters are revealed.

In the first part, there are weirdly placed, random drops of mathematics, vaguely relating to the scene at hand. At some point, they cease to appear. ( )

When 6-year-old Isaiah Christianson falls of the roof of his apartment building and dies, Smilla Jasperson doesn't believe it's an accident and begins to investigate on her own. Conspiracies, drugs, glaciers, this book has it all. Smilla is an amazing character and the best part of the book. I thought the ending was bizarre and left too many loose ends just hanging there. ( )

The prose was sometimes difficult to follow, not sure if this was due to the translation. Some very unlikely scenarios. ( )

This thriller begins when Smilla’s six-year-old neighbor falls from a snow-covered roof, and it is declared an accidental death. She decides to investigate the death on her own, using her Inuit knowledge of snow, and she encounters a dangerous and suspenseful mystery, as will you.

After reading this book I actually lived in Denmark for a while and saw the dark side of this well regarded modern nation. The Greenlanders' natural wisdom and simple attitude to life have no place in the work-ethic materialistic white Denmark, but instead form a perceptable dark-skinned minority living on benefits and alcohol, who act out the shadow side that the natural Danes seek to deny in polite manners and social democracy. A northern version of Australia and the persecuted originals of that vast continent. Peter Hoeg, in this and in other novels, exposes 'Authority' and the fear and hostility that those who hold it have for people who won't play their game. ( )

I spent a lot of time on this one, but it was worth it (Ok, I've been reading it since Christmas...). It's an epic, really, with amazing character development that also has a sense of suspense to it while also managing to be literary AND taught me things about Greenlander/Danish relations. I'm not giving it 5 stars because it was a book that I could walk away from, but it also was always one that I came back to. ( )

An inventive thriller with an unlikely but refreshingly believable heroine. ( )

This book was really hard to read, but so so so rewarding to get through. I think it's difficulty in reading was based partly on the translation (not that it was bad) and the non-English style structure and prose. While quite a stunning literary achievement and a beautifully put together narrative, sometimes the jerky wordsmithing made me reread paragraphs or pages to figure out what was going on. This was a mooched book and several people had signed one of the end pages with similar sentiments: "Eve - fascinating mystery - not easy to read".

I really do recommend this one though, it was spectacular and not something an American or English author could write at all. I've read enough now to know that. I love Smilla and her courage, wit, strengths and weaknesses. While not someone you could generally meet on the street, she was utterly believable and I rooted for her, even when I couldn't comprehend her motivations and had no clue what was going on. For most of the book I couldn't figure out why she was so ravenously trying to solve this mystery, but it made sense in the end, her connection to Isaiah. The rest of the characters are equally well crafted and simplistic compared to the complexity of the heroine.

Again, highly highly recommended, especially for those fans of non-English literature. This is one of few Danish works I've read, but will hopefully not be the last. ( )

It's a long time since I read this book. After I read it I wanted to read everything else written by Peter Hoeg and to read other scandanavian novels just to recreate the experience. ( )

This has been on my list for a long time. I'm just starting it, but it seems like I should have been reading this at the same time as EAST by Edith Pattou

This book was a weird mixture...parts amazing and parts indifferent. I'm sure I'm not the first to observe that this novel doesn't feel at all like a detective/mystery novel. It's too insightful, too observant, too honest, too deep to be just that. Plus, the protagonist -Smilla - is one of the most fascinating women I've read about in a long time. So why not an even higher rating? Well, there were various things that bothered me - little things, yet things that poked and poked at me until they annoyed the hell out of me. Things like Smilla's love interest - who I thought shouldn't have been in the book in the first place. (IMO, Hoeg should've either left out the "love story" all together or drawn a more sympathetic/interesting character.) Or like most of the different characters in the second part of the book (on the boat) who were more like stereotyped caricatures representing a universe united against Smilla. Like the fact that I couldn't have cared less if the murdered kid had turned out to be eaten by Bigfoot - and the identity of the murderer surely should be of interest in a mystery novel, no? And, although it didn't bother me, I feel obliged to warn you that the ending was almost bordering on sci-fi, so be prepared for that as well. Hoeg was a sailor, a fencer and a mountaineer before he was a writer, so it's not surprising that he is at his best when he writes about the things that interest him most. The best parts of the book are those where Smilla reminisces about her childhood, talks about her love of ice and her passion for both nature and science, and describes the world and people around her. The worst parts are those where the novel purported to be a romance book, a detective novel, or a thriller. I still recommend this book - don't think for a moment that it's boring or bad - it just isn't what it claims to be.

Quote:
"I can't imagine that anything like the Christian image of hell actually exists. But lately I've been wondering about the ancient Greenlandic realm of the dead. If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead. ( )

Smilla is an unemployed, half-Danish glaciologist caught between the two worlds of Greenland's eskimos and 20th century Denmark. When a young eskimo boy dies in Denmark (not a spoiler), she has nothing better to do and decides to investigate his death. This investigation exposes her to much danger, and through her adventures Smilla learns much about life, death, and the unyielding ice (or at least the reader does--Smilla appears to have known all along). Smilla is herself a wonderful character, not at all charming, but thoughtful and resourceful and passionate and insightful. Unfortunately, while the book itself is entertaining, the mood haunting, and the writing lyrical, the motivations of characters and their actions don't always seem to fit. For example, Smilla decides (minor spoiler) to take a job as a stewardess on a cargo ship, even though she knows the people on the ship are after her(?). She also, despite her own highly developed intuition, manages to be completely taken in by a man who she describes as "not a natural liar." Oh, and the ending is a bit over the top. So if while reading, you decide that Smilla must be an unreliable narrator, you're probably right--but perhaps in a more fundamental way than you're expecting. ( )

My reactions to this book need to be divided into two parts: the first two-thirds of the story and the last third. I would have given the first part 4½ stars; I would give the last part only 2. In the end, I would recommend reading this book in order to experience the former, but it could have been so much more.

The first part of the book is beautifully written—nominally a mystery, it felt more like a literary work. Within a couple of pages I was completely involved with the main character, Smilla Jaspersen: brilliant, lonely, isolated because she exists neither in the upper-crust Danish society of her father nor the Greenlander Inuit existence that was her mother’s. Setting her in Copenhagen, Høeg portrays the familiar story of problems caused with the Western "civilization" of native peoples, and the resulting alienation felt by the Greenlanders in the society that supposedly embraces them.

A mystery is used as a vehicle for the story. Examining the snow tracks of a boy who police believe fell accidentally off a roof, Smilla realizes the real story must be quite different and proceeds to pull at the loose ends to find out what happened. It is well-written and the author manages to build a good feeling of suspense, using the first-person narrative of Smilla’s thoughts and her stubborn refusal to be stopped by the roadblocks put in her way by all around her to tell his larger story.

The last third relocates to a ship heading to Greenland and then Greenland, itself. At this point, the book changes from an exceptionally well-written mystery to a plot treatment for a Hollywood summer blockbuster. It’s as if Clive Cussler stepped in and took over as the author. The writing switches from a literary focus on the characters to a thriller focus on the action and violence. It’s disconcerting and disappointing. It even treads the line of bizarre in explaining the real goals of the villains though, thankfully, it backs away at the last moment, leaving some explanations firmly set in ambiguity. By the last page, we are expecting a fireworks ending, but it fails to materialize as the book suddenly attempts a return to subtlety. Unfortunately, the reader is now firmly in thriller mode and this comes across as anticlimactic, weak and even more unsatisfying.

If the world worked the way I’d like, Mr. Høeg would throw away everything from page 255 onward and finish the story in the same way he started it: beautiful, atmospheric and rich. I’d recommend a try just to experience the first part of the novel; skim the last third if you must. ( )

Finally finished this after starting it in Denmark in the summer. Unbelievably overrated. Pretentious, ponderous piffle, with a heroine so annoying you increasingly wish she'd get her smug face smashed in. ( )

Smilla Jaspersen is a 37-year-old single woman born in Greenland to an Inuit mother and Danish father. The book opens with the seemingly accidental death of a young boy she befriended in her Denmark apartment building. Suspicious circumstances surrounding Isaiah's death prompt her to investigate, and she stops at nothing to find the truth. Her quest unearths a 1991 expedition to Greenland involving Isaiah's father, and a nearly identical journey 25 years earlier involving some of the same characters. What all of this has to do with Isaiah is a complex web full of bad guys, science, and a bit of romance.

Smilla is a strong, independent female protagonist. Her knowledge of the science behind the expedition allows her to learn the truth about Isaiah, and then some. And yet she is also vulnerable, with deep emotional needs she has suppressed for years. She is a real person, not a superhero, making this complex mystery believable. The plot twists and turns, introducing good guys who turn out to be bad guys, and dead bodies turning up at the most surprising moments. About 3/4 of the way through I trusted no one; I wasn't even sure about Smilla herself. Smilla's Sense of Snow was a real page-turner that had me constantly looking over my shoulder and checking the back seat of my car. Recommended. ( )

Hm, okay, something was missing for me. Miss Smilla is a fabulous literary detective, I loved her take on the world and her intelligence and her determination to remain herself and her back story. I was interested in the depiction of Greenland (I don't think I've ever read anything set there or in the Arctic itself before!) and the interesting politics between Greenland and Denmark. And I'm a maths nerd from way back, so I did like the maths bits (which did disappear after a while...).

But. There could have been some more explanation of the whole Denmark/Greenland thing. I ended up just accepting that this wasn't the book that was going to explain it for me and just going with the flow, but it peeved me rather. And Smilla is far too intuitive a detective: she might have known what was going on and how she got from A to B, but I was lost and floundering. I'm not even convinced she knew what was happening, I think sometimes she was just bounced around at the whim of the author.

And, finally, the ending. I stuck it out until then because jubby mentioned that she hadn't seen the ending coming (I did point out that I hadn't seen anything coming). And then almost threw the book across the room. The twist was just bizarre, and didn't make sense in any way. (Although it did explain all the bizarre threads from the rest of the book, but I don't see that as necessarily a plus.)

I really think I missed something with this. ( )

Detective / spy thriller/ social comentary based in Denmark. Prejeudice against those of Inuit descent? corrupt government systems? in Denmark?, always thought the Danes were more civilised than that, although what do I know. it is fiction but there must be some truth in there.
Gripping read ( )

9.0

I had misgivings about this book; that is, until I read it. I had previously encountered Hoeg through his short stories, collected in 'Tales of the Night'. But I hadn't enjoyed any of that work particularly much, and doubted that I would feel differently here.

However, a good and close friend of mine recommended 'Miss Smilla', and so it was impossible for me to refuse to read the book; and a good thing too, as it is one of the most original and scintillating novels I have read in a great while.

At its heart, 'Miss Smilla' is a detective story. Smilla, the eponymous hero, is not herself a detective; precisely what she does is not made perfectly clear. She is antisocial and her world is made up of fractured relationships, even down to her country: she is a Greenlander, but finds herself living an unwanted life in Denmark. What Smilla does know, if not about being a detective, then it is about everything to do with the snow and ice.

The Coen brothers once said of their masterful 'The Man Who Wasn't There,' that once they had decided that the plot concerned blackmail and a barber, the rest effectively wrote itself; perhaps that's true here. There is a death involving a child that Smilla had grown close to, and clues in the snow. The rest follows naturally. Smilla is always true to herself; of all the books I have read written in first person singular, this is the most consistent in narrative voice of any I have read in recent times.

The ending is obscure and difficult - I will say that much, to prepare readers as they approach it. One could argue that Hoeg, in setting up this mystery, did not very well know how to end it, and so does not; but within the universe this story creates for itself, it is not a bad ending, and I could not have thought of one better myself. ( )

I was expecting this to be a fantastic thriller, given all the accompanying hype, and the first few chapters certainly created an intriguing situation and character. Smilla is a lonely woman with an uncomfortable relationship with her father and life. Memories also gradually reveal her relationship with a young neighbouring boy who has recently died by, apparently, falling off a roof. Smilla’s knowledge of snow and the boy leads her to believe that there is more to the death than is immediately obvious, and the opening chapters soon begin to bear this out as she meets a wall of hostility from various figures of authority. In this section, tension and intrigue are gradually built up, as is Smilla’s relationship with another neighbour who had befriended Isaiah.

The book is well written, in the sense that description is often vivid and details build up slowly. Many of the characters are interesting and it takes a while to get a real sense of who they are and what motivates them. In this sense, the novel works as a mystery.

However, personally, after the first 200 pages, I was battling to complete the story as the action moved from land to a boat and the focus shifted from Smilla’s relationships to espionage and violence. Knowing very little about boats and Danish/Greenlandic history certainly didn’t help, but I found that the most frustrating element was the lack of clarity in events. Miss Smilla never expresses what she is doing to the reader; you see her doing it and create your own ideas regarding her motives. To me, this made the character too opaque. The other characters seemed to slide between being extremely violent and patiently allowing Smilla to roam the ship freely. This didn’t seem believable, especially the way that the main character accepts a key betrayal without really reacting. She herself seems too cold a character to empathise with.

The action picked up again in the last few chapters as it finally seemed that the story was moving towards a resolution after the prolonged ‘hide-and-seek’ nature of events on the boat. Motives were revealed and some kind of denouement seemed imminent. I feel that, without wishing to spoil the ending, it is fair to warn people that the end of the novel is ambiguous and unlikely to be appreciated by those who (like me) appreciate having a story neatly wrapped up.

Overall, if I read this book again, I’d be tempted to miss out all the chapters which take place on the boat and just focus on Smilla’s relationships with others – in these chapters, sometimes unexpected dialogue allows key moments of humour and pathos. This is a book to borrow first, rather than buy, in case you become frustrated by the plot and slow pace. ( )

fiction, murder, conspiracy, thriller, mystery, death, crime, greenland, scandinavian, europe, denmark, inuit, snow, contemporary, translated, novel, violent, betrayal, expedition, ( )