88
PARTISAN REVIEW
resists complete elucidation."
There are impenetrable mysteries of a very different kind in
Smilla's
Sense
of
Snow
by the young Danish novelist Peter Hoeg. For one thing,
it's hard to figure out what genre this dense and tantalizing story belongs
to -is it a murder mystery, science fiction, morality tale, or an intricately
plotted adventure wrapped in a carapace of technical information,
a
la
Tom Clancy? At first reading, it appears to be a manically complicated
thriller narrated by a truculent, ferociously opinionated, erudite, disorga–
nized, strangely beguiling woman of thirty-seven named Smilla Qaavigaaq
Jaspersen, her mother an Inuit of Greenland, her father a world-renowned
Danish anesthesiologist who fell in love with a beautiful bearskin-clothed
Eskimo while doing medical research in Greenland.
Nor is her curious parentage the only oddity in Smilla's history and
temperament. She has a degree in glaciology and has published papers in
various journals, but Smilla is by nature too rebellious and ornery to hold
a permanent job, preferring to use her specialized knowledge about ice
and snow on occasional scientific expeditions to Greenland. An in–
domitable loner and outsider, she feels "the same way about solitude as
some people feel about the blessing of the church. It's the light of grace
for me." And she runs into trouble whenever some arm of Danish au–
thority tries to force her to conform. Though she is half-Danish and lives
in Copenhagen, her deep-rooted loathing for the culture and government
and moral climate of Denmark - "humiliating, exhausting, monotonous"
- erupts with unmediated bitterness throughout the novel. She gives no
quarter, thinks of herself as a colonial through and through, and blames
her father for her "loss of cultural identity." And she is as antisocial as a
polar bear: "I think more highly of snow and ice than love. It's easier for
me to be interested in mathematics than to have affection for my fellow
human beings."
When Smilla's six-year-old Eskimo neighbor and friend, Isaiah,
plunges to his death from the snow-covered roof of their apartment house
in Copenhagen, she refuses to accept the police verdict that his fall was an
accident. She knows the child was terrified of heights, and when she ex–
amines the tracks on the wintry roof, she is convinced that the boy, run–
ning in terror, was pushed. Intrepid as her mother, who was a fearless
hunter, Smilla is determined to uncover the truth behind Isaiah's murder,
and she soon finds herself in lethally hazardous waters. Probing and
snooping, she begins to suspect a vast conspiracy of corruption that is
ominously connected with a ship equipped for a mysterious scientific
project in Greenland. Undeterred by the danger she is exposing herself to,
not in the least from the thuggish crew, Smilla signs on as a stewardess.
