is a thriller, but it’s a thriller like no other. Maybe a le Carre novel comes closest, with its brainy characters enmeshed in deliciously intricate conundrums fraught with moral, emotional and geopolitical dangers. But le Carre, whose view of women can most charitably be called old-fashioned, could never have created a narrator as daring and self-sufficient as Smilla. Most extraordinary of all is the setting: this novel takes place in the snows of Greenland, the ice floes of the North Atlantic, the endless dark of a Copenhagen winter. The only thing that thaws during this adventure is Smilla’s long-frozen heart.
Smilla’s mother was a hunter: “She shot and paddled a kayak and dragged meat home like a man.” Her father, a Danish physician who went to Greenland to do research, married there but hated the place and left when Smilla was 3. Four years later she was forced to join him in Denmark when her mother died. As a half-Greenlander, she has always felt like a misfit in Denmark, the country that colonized her birthplace. For a while she dabbled in protest politics, but her driving passion is ice. Smilla knows ice and snow the way le Carre’s operatives know locks or codes or bombs; there’s nobody better. She’s a regular on Arctic expeditions, and her publications include such titles as “Mathematical Models for Brine Drainage from Seawater Ice.” She hates cooking, loves clothes and was relentlessly independent until a small, neglected boy named Isaiah moved into her apartment building and made himself her friend. Now Isaiah is dead.
It’s clear to the police that the little boy fell off the roof of the building–his footprints on the snowy rooftop prove it. But not to Smilla. She knows Isaiah was terrified of heights; what’s more, she can read his tracks in the snow. They’re footprints made too fast, made in fear, not in play. Somebody was chasing him. When the authorities refuse to investigate–when, in fact, they start investigating Smilla–she sets off on her own. Soon she’s joined by another friend of Isaiah’s, the quiet mechanic who lives in her building. Their sleuthing partnership doesn’t begin very auspiciously-mistaking him for an enemy in the dark, she shoves a bookcase at him and bashes him across the neck with a brass rod–but love manages to bloom. Together they amass clues that reveal widening circles of death, greed and deceit. Finally, Smilla joins the crew of a mysterious shipping expedition and heads out toward the icy straits off Greenland. There she discovers the answers she has been seeking-and an ugly surprise as well.
“Smilla’s Sense of Snow” is such a hugely satisfying novel that it’s hard to believe Peter Hoeg never wrote a thriller before. But according to the Danish novelist, he didn’t even know this one was a thriller until people started telling him. “I only knew I was writing a book about an enigma,” he says. Hoeg, 36, is the author of two previous books–a novel about Danish history, and a collection of love stories–but this is the first of his books to be translated into English (and beautifully, by Tiina Nunnally). He worked as a dancer, an actor, an athlete and a sailor–“on rich people’s boats”–before settling down to write. “Ten years ago I was much more restless than I am now,” he says. “I knew all the time, as I was starting other careers, that this was not final, it was a transition, something that would be replaced by something else. I don’t have that feeling any longer. One thing that came to me with writing was peace.”
With his wife, a dancer from Kenya, and their daughter, Hoeg has spent much of his time recently in Africa and Cuba. So how did he happen to write a novel about snow and ice? He can’t explain it, but one winter the idea simply came to him. “I had dreams about Greenland,” he says–a place he’s visited often. A lot of Americans are going to be dreaming about Greenland, too, after they close this wonderful book.
