Volume 40, Number 19 · November 18, 1993
Danger: Thin Ice
By Michael Meyer
Smilla's Sense of Snow
by Peter Hoeg, translated by Tiina Nunnally
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 453 pp., $21.00
Smilla's Sense of Snow, by the young and already much acclaimed Danish novelist Peter Hoeg, is a mystery story with heavy scientific undertones. The chief character and narrator is a half-Eskimo, half-Danish woman of thirty-seven, living in Copenhagen, a semi-voluntary exile haunted by her Greenland heritage and her memories of that strange and magical land. She is single, childless, a moody misfit. Her Eskimo mother, whom she adored, died beneath the Greenland ice, and she does not get on with her father, a distinguished Danish medico. She is on the side of the Greenland Eskimos against the Danes who have colonized them.
Review, 923 words
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