Smilla's Sense of Snow
SynopsisPlot
She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science, and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a strange land. And now Smilla Jaspersen is convinced she has uncovered a shattering crime...
Story
About this book
Smilla Jaspersen is a Greenlander living in Copenhagen, a woman whose understanding of snow and ice runs deeper than her grasp of love. When a six-year-old boy from her apartment building, also a Greenlander, falls from the roof and dies, the police record an accident. Smilla studies the tracks left in the rooftop snow and reads them differently. Her sense of how snow holds a footprint tells her the verdict is wrong.
She is a woman of numbers and science, more at ease with frozen ground than with company, carrying memories of Greenland and an outsider's eye for Danish society. Her questions about the boy's death draw her out of the margins and into a widening set of secrets, set between the density of Copenhagen and the Arctic territory of Greenland, long governed from Denmark.
Peter Hoeg published the novel in Danish in 1992. It works as a crime story and as an account of cultural displacement, colonial history, and the gap between institutional authority and one person's careful observation. Snow itself functions as evidence here, a surface that records what happened before anyone arrives to explain it.
