Smilla's Sense of Snow

Peter Høeg
1993

Introduction

Published in Denmark as Froken Smillas fornemmelse for sne in 1992, and appearing in translation as Smilla's Sense of Snow in the United States and as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow in England in 1993, Peter Høeg's novel quickly moved to the top of the bestseller lists in Europe and the United States. Although Høeg had enjoyed modest commercial and critical success in Denmark with his earlier book Forestilling om det tyvende arhundrede (1988), published as The History of Danish Dreams in 1995 in the United States, it was his third novel that rocketed Høeg into the international limelight. The book has been published in more than thirty countries, was named the 1993 book of the year by both Time and Entertainment Weekly, spent twenty-six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and was made into a film by Danish director Bille August in 1997. In addition to this remarkable popular success, the novel has won favor among literary critics, who note Høeg's careful attention to setting and culture. As Thomas Satterlee notes, "In many of his novels Høeg explores Danish society by deliberately including characters from a wide range of social classes." Smilla's Sense of Snow is notable for its treatment of Danish culture, Greenlandic culture, and the inevitable clash of values brought about by the shift from a colonial to postcolonial relationship between the two. In addition, Høeg examines that strange land of the person caught between cultures in the characters of Smilla and Isaiah. Finally, Høeg plays with conventions and expectations in his use

and subversion of the murder mystery/suspense novel genre. Smilla's Sense of Snow is a complicated and rich novel, a fast-paced thriller, a love story, an anthropological exploration, and a philosophical treatise all in one book. Høeg's accomplishment with this novel has moved him to the top of the list of Danish writers publishing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Author Biography

Peter Høeg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 17, 1957. His father was a lawyer and his mother a classical philologist. Høeg worked as an actor, dancer, drama teacher, and sailor before turning to writing in 1988. Høeg has also traveled extensively throughout the world, most notably in Africa. His wife, Akinyi, is Kenyan, and Høeg and his family visit Africa frequently.

Høeg's first novel Forestilling om det tyvende arhundrede was published in Denmark in 1988. Translated as The History of Danish Dreams, the book was published in English in 1995. Critics praised the debut novel highly. However, it was not until the publication of his third novel, Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne, that Høeg became known internationally. Published simultaneously in 1993 as Smilla's Sense of Snow by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States and as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow in England, the novel immediately won outstanding reviews from critics and readers alike. Tiina Nunnally, the translator of the American version and the primary translator of the English version, along with the pseudonymous "F. David," also won high praise from reviewers for her brilliant rendering of the Danish novel into English. She received an award from the American Translators Association for her translation of the novel. Both Time and Entertainment Weekly selected Smilla's Sense of Snow as their best novel of the year. In 1997, director Bille August released his film rendition of the novel. The novel also won a 1992 Glass Key award from the Crime Writers of Scandinavia. Since its publication, Smilla's Sense of Snow has been translated into seventeen languages, testifying to its worldwide appeal.

Høeg's other works include Tales of the Night, a collection of short stories, first published in Danish in 1990 and in English in 1997. Borderliners, a novel, was published in Denmark in 1993 and in the United States and England in 1994. Finally, The Woman and the Ape, a novel, was published in Denmark, the United States, and England in 1996. Høeg established a foundation with the profits from this book to aid women and children in third world countries. At present, Høeg lives in Copenhagen with his wife and two children.

Plot Summary

The City: Part 1

Smilla's Sense of Snow opens in Copenhagen, Denmark, "the city" alluded to in the section title. The very short first chapter locates the scene in a Greenlanders' cemetery during the funeral for Isaiah, a young Inuit boy, killed by falling from the roof of a warehouse. The chapter also introduces the reader to the first-person narrator, Smilla, as well as to Isaiah's mother, Juliane, and the mechanic, later identified as Peter Føjl. Although the chapter is just a little over two pages long, it closes with an important insight for Smilla, an insight that sustains her through the rest of the novel: "All along I must have had a comprehensive pact with Isaiah not to leave him in the lurch, never, not even now."

The story turns in the next chapters to a series of flashbacks. In the first, Smilla recounts returning late one December afternoon to the White Palace, the apartment complex where she, Isaiah, Juliane, and Føjl live, to find Isaiah dead on the ground and police all over the scene. Føjl, the first person to find him, is also there, crying. Although the police call Isaiah's fall an accident, Smilla believes it to be foul play for two important reasons: first, Isaiah was terrified of heights and would never have been on the roof except to escape from someone intent on doing him harm; and second, when Smilla reads the footprints in the snow, she knows he has jumped off the roof, not fallen, for some unknown reason, most probably to escape from someone or something that frightened him badly.

In another set of flashbacks, Smilla tells of meeting Isaiah about a year and a half earlier and of their developing love for each other. Isaiah often turned to both Smilla and to Føjl when Juliane was drunk and unable to care for him. Through these flashbacks, the reader comes to understand the bond between Smilla and the child and to understand her dogged determination to find out what really happened to him.

During this opening section, Smilla begins her investigation into Isaiah's death, talking to the police; to Ravn, an investigator; to Jeanne Pierre Lagermann, the forensic expert who first examines Isaiah's body; and to Johannes Loyen, the powerful director of the Institute for Arctic Medicine. These meetings do nothing to ease Smilla's suspicions about the boy's death. After going through Juliane's papers, she discovers a link between Isaiah and the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark, a firm that both mines and explores Greenland. Isaiah's father was killed during an expedition to Greenland with the Cryolite Corporation, and the company has granted a widow's pension to Juliane.

In the first part of the novel, the reader is also introduced to Peter Moritz Jaspersen, Smilla's father, a very wealthy anesthesiologist and golfer. Smilla and Moritz have a deeply troubled relationship; however, Moritz supports Smilla financially and gathers the information for which she asks him, about Loyen, Tørk, and the Cryolite Corporation. The meeting with Moritz also pushes Smilla to recall her childhood in Greenland and her mother, Ane, a hunter who is now dead.

The reader discovers that Smilla is an expert glaciologist, someone who can read ice and snow better than nearly any other person on the planet. Although she has never finished any advanced degrees, she has published on the subject and is regarded as the foremost expert on ice. She also has an uncanny ability to navigate her way through non-navigable conditions in the Arctic.

A final important event of the opening chapters is the growing relationship between Smilla and Føjl. Although neither truly trusts the other, they begin an affair that leads to Smilla falling in love with Føjl.

The City: Part 2

The tension tightens in part two as Smilla follows leads to Loyen; David Ving, an accountant and lawyer who seems to be threatening Juliane in some way; and to Andreas Fine Licht, an expert in Eskimo culture and dialect. All three seem to have some connection to the mysterious expedition to Greenland in 1966 that ended in explosions killing eight people and then a second expedition in 1991 that resulted in Isaiah's father's death. In addition, all three seem to have some connection to yet another expedition being mounted. Føjl also learns that Isaiah was picked up every month by Ving to be examined at a hospital. Smilla discovers the name of Tørk Hiijd. Smilla goes to Licht in order to have a tape she finds in Isaiah's hiding place translated. Licht lives on a boat where The Arctic Museum is housed. Smilla leaves the tape with Licht but returns to the boat when she receives a call from Licht to come at once. She finds Licht murdered just before the boat explodes, and someone tries to kill her. Smilla barely escapes with her life.

The City: Part 3

In the last part of the first section of the novel, more pieces fall into place. Smilla connects Loyen to a conference on "Neocatastrophism." As Moritz explains to her, neocatastrophism is a scientific debate over how great natural catastrophes have affected the evolution of the earth. In addition, she discovers that during the expeditions to Greenland, the divers did not die of botulism as reported by the Cryolite Corporation. Rather, they died from a worm found in the water surrounding a meteorite, a worm that is normally only found in the tropics but that generally does not cause the death of its host. In addition, with help from Føjl's friend, Birgo Lander, she identifies the ship being outfitted for the next secret expedition to Greenland. Lander introduces her to the captain and arranges for her to travel with the expedition as a stewardess. She narrowly misses being picked up by the police at her father's home, but he helps her escape and delivers her to Lander, who takes her to the ship, the Kronos.

The Sea: Part 1

All of the action of the second section of the novel takes place on ship. Smilla meets a variety of dangerous characters, including Jakkelsen, the captain's brother, who is also a heroin addict, and Verlaine, the first mate from some unknown tropical location. She also discovers that there are three mysterious passengers on board who are directing the mission, much to Captain Lukas's displeasure. While on the ship, Smilla continues her investigation, sometimes at great risk to her own safety. She eventually learns that Tørk is one of the secret passengers on board. The trip becomes ever more dangerous as she discovers that the Kronos is being used to smuggle drugs by Verlaine. Smilla tries to leave the ship when it stops for refueling and supplies; she is stopped, however, when she finds Jakkelson lying dead at the station platform. She also notes with shock that a new passenger is coming on board; the passenger is none other than Føjl. Although she is uncertain about his loyalty, Smilla returns to the ship because, as she says, "One of the few people who make life worth living is on board the Kronos."

However, Smilla's trust is misplaced. Føjl hands her over to Tørk, who says she is under arrest and orders Verlaine to lock her in her cabin. As the section closes, Smilla reveals that she knows she is not under arrest but will be killed: "Verlaine is the one who locks the door…. There is some thing honest about his silence. It tells me that this isn't a cell and I haven't been arrested. This is the beginning of the conclusion, which will happen sometime soon."

The Ice

The last section is the shortest of the book and takes place at Isla Gela Alta, the site of the subterranean cavern, housing the mysterious meteorite. Smilla has learned that Føjl is preparing to dive into the lake to begin preparations for removing the meteorite. She also knows that he will die if he does so. Smilla escapes the ship and races to the location of the work, where Tørk greets her as if he knew she would come. When the conclusion comes, it comes quickly: Lukas shoots Verlaine with a harpoon as Verlaine is about to kill Smilla. Smilla discovers, finally, that Tørk was the one on the roof when Isaiah died and that he pursued him in order to wrest the tape from him. Lukas aims the harpoon at Tørk, but Tørk blows his arm off. Føjl turns on Tørk, who kicks him to the ground. Tørk begins to run for the ship. The book ends with Smilla tracking Tørk, herding him out on to thinner and thinner ice. As Smilla says in the last five words of the book: "There will be no resolution."

Media Adaptations

• Smilla's Sense of Snow was adapted into a film in 1997 by Twentieth Century Fox. The film was directed by Bille August and starred Julia Ormond as Smilla, Gabriel Byrne as Føjl, and Richard Harris as Moritz. The film is available in both video and DVD formats.
• The soundtrack to the film Smilla's Sense of Snow was released on CD by Elektra/Asylum in March of 1997.
• An abridged version of Smilla's Sense of Snow, read by Rebecca Pidgeon, was released by Harper Collins in August 1993 as an audiobook.
• A reading group guide for Smilla's Sense of Snow is available at www.randomhouse.com/resources/bookgroup/smillassense_bgc.html (last accessed October 2002) along with an interview with the author, discussion questions, an author biography, and links to other sites.
• Another reading group guide for Smilla's Sense of Snow is available at www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/smillas_sense_of_snow.asp (last accessed October 2002), including interviews, biography, questions, and links.

Characters

Isaiah Christensen

Although Isaiah is dead as the novel opens, all events of the story circulate around him. The reader comes to know Isaiah through flashbacks narrated by Smilla and Føjl, who calls the child "the Baron." Isaiah is a young Greenlandic child living with his mother in the White Palace apartments in Copenhagen. He is deathly afraid of heights. He is old beyond his years and turns to Smilla and Føjl when his mother is too drunk to care for him. In Isaiah, Smilla sees a younger version of herself, a transplanted Greenlander ill at ease in Danish culture. There is a mystery surrounding Isaiah as well; Smilla learns after his death that powerful men from the Cryolite Corporation and the Arctic Medicine Institute were studying Isaiah and his response to a dangerous parasite that killed his father while diving in Greenland. Indeed, it is Smilla's relationship to Isaiah that leads her to risk her own life in order to understand the boy's death.

Juliane Christensen

Juliane Christensen is Isaiah's mother, a widowed, alcoholic Greenlander living in the White Palace in Copenhagen. Smilla discovers after Isaiah's death that Juliane's living expenses are covered by the Cryolite Corporation, the company for whom her husband was working at the time of his death.

Peter Føjl

Føjl, also referred to throughout the book as "the mechanic," is a large, bear-like man who lives in the same apartment complex with Smilla and Isaiah. He, too, has established a special relationship with Isaiah. Indeed, he is the one who first discovers Isaiah's body. He is a mysterious man, someone who has a variety of talents one would not expect to find in a simple mechanic. In addition, his tastes in food and wine suggest that he has lived outside of Denmark. As he and Smilla begin to cautiously work together to unravel the mystery of Isaiah's death, Føjl and Smilla fall in love, in spite of the fact that neither really trusts the other. Føjl introduces Smilla to Lander, who gets her on board the Kronos. Føjl then disappears, only to resurface in Greenland as the fourth secret passenger on the boat. As it turns out, Føjl has been hired by Ving from the very beginning to keep an eye on Isaiah, Juliane, and Smilla. He is also an expert diver, having been a member of an elite Danish navy undercover team similar to the Navy Seals. Tørk has hired him to dive for the meteorite. It is difficult for the reader to truly judge Føjl's loyalties: on the one hand, he was truly devoted to Isaiah, and later to Smilla; on the other, he is greedy and willing to work for those who have murdered Isaiah. This paradox is not resolved by the end of the book.

Tørk Hviid

Tørk, the son of a Danish musician who mistreated him, grows up to be a brilliant scientist of ice and snow. It is he who has discovered a meteorite in a lake on a Greenlandic island and who has attempted to remove the meteorite on at least two previous occasions. He is the mastermind behind Isaiah's death and the current expedition to Greenland. A ruthless man, he is, nonetheless, very attractive to Smilla, even as he plots her death.

Jakkelsen

Lukas's younger brother, Jakkelsen is also a drug addict shipping on the Kronos in an attempt by his brother to straighten him out. He takes an interest in Smilla. However, once he discovers a load of drugs on board the ship, his days are numbered. He is murdered when the ship stops at the Greenland Star for offshore refueling and restocking.

Ane Jaspersen

Ane is Smilla's mother who dies when Smilla is just seven years old. She is a native Greenland hunter. For Smilla's first seven years, she travels with her mother on hunts. Ane is the great love of Moritz Jaspersen's life. Although she has been dead for many years at the opening of the novel, Smilla flashes back to her mother many times as she considers the differences between Greenlandic and Danish culture.

Jørgen Moritz Jaspersen

Generally referred to as "Moritz," Smilla's father is an extraordinarily wealthy physician and golfer. He met Ane when in Greenland to do research, and fell passionately in love with her. The marriage broke up after four years, but Moritz sent for Smilla after the death of her mother. At the time of the novel, Moritz is married to a ballet dancer thirteen years younger than Smilla. His relationship with his daughter is troubled and ambiguous.

Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen

Smilla Jaspersen is the main character of Smilla's Sense of Snow, a thirty-year-old woman living in Denmark, the daughter of a Greenlandic hunter woman and a Danish doctor. Smilla is a solitary, brilliant woman who lives in an apartment complex called the White Palace. A loner, Smilla nevertheless befriends a young Greenlandic boy named Isaiah, caring for him when his alcoholic mother is unable to do so. When Smilla returns to her apartment complex one day to find Isaiah's crumpled body on the pavement, evidently the victim of an accident, Smilla vows to find out what really happened to the boy. She suspects foul play, and her investigation of what turns out to be murder forms the plot of the novel. Smilla is a particularly interesting character. Throughout the novel, she recalls her childhood in Greenland before her mother's death, commenting on the differences between the Inuit culture of her mother and the western, Danish culture of her father. She also reveals the trauma of being brought to Denmark at age seven and placed in boarding schools. Smilla is cynical, rebellious, and brilliant. An expert on ice and snow, she has taken a number of expeditions to Greenland for research. However, her disdain for European culture and her own eccentricities prevented her from finishing an advanced degree, although she has published frequently on the subjects of ice and snow. Indeed, Smilla is recognized by the scientific community as one of the top experts in glacial morphology and ice in the world. In addition, Smilla has a perfect sense of direction. She is able to navigate through fog, ice, and snow without losing her direction. As the first person narrator of the novel, Smilla reveals her love of mathematics, her knowledge of philosophy and physics, and her view of the history of the troubled relationship between Denmark and Greenland. Smilla is at times a paradox, both rough and vulnerable. Through determination and will, she winds her way into the heart of the mystery, placing herself in grave danger, keeping her promise to Isaiah "not to leave him in the lurch, never, not even now."

Jean Pierre Lagermann

Lagermann is a forensic medicine expert who first examines Isaiah's body. He reveals to Smilla that a muscle biopsy has been removed from the body sometime after the child's death.

Birgo Lander

Birgo Lander is a friend of Føjl who owns and directs a shipping firm. He helps Smilla identify the vessel being outfitted for the expedition to Greenland, and he later helps her make contact with Captain Lukas who hires her as a stewardess. Lander also delivers Smilla to the Kronos.

Andres Fine Licht

The blind curator of the Arctic Museum, Licht is a professor of Eskimo languages and cultures. Smilla takes him the tape recording she finds in Isaiah's box, and he interprets it for her. A native Greenlander, he is also the person who spoke at Isaiah's funeral. Licht is murdered on the ship housing the Arctic Museum, after summoning Smilla who nearly dies in the resulting fire. Smilla later learns that Licht was one of the members of the previous expedition to Greenland.

Johannes Loyen

Loyen is the powerful director of the Institute of Arctic Medicine. He performs autopsies of all Greenlandic deaths in Denmark and consequently autopsied Isaiah's body. His interest in Isaiah is deeper than it first appears, however. He is researching the deadly parasite found in the ocean water off Greenland that killed Isaiah's father and that remains inactive in Isaiah's body. He is part of the expedition team that goes to Greenland under deep secrecy to investigate the meteor and the parasite.

Elsa Lübing

Elsa Lübing is the chief accountant of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark. When Smilla goes through Juliane's papers, she finds a letter from Elsa expressing sympathy over the death of Isaiah's father and informing Juliane that she will be receiving a stipend from the company. When Smilla contacts Elsa, she learns valuable information about the previous two expeditions to Greenland. Elsa is highly religious, and she shares this information because she is concerned about the ethics and morality of the current state of affairs in the Cryolite Corporation.

Sigmund Lukas

Lukas is the captain of the Kronos, the ship chartered by Loyen and Tørk for the current expedition to Greenland to try to extricate the meteorite at Gela Alta. A good captain, he is also a compulsive gambler. He thus takes the job because of the money it will bring him, although he is fearful of the purpose of the job and dislikes the secrecy of those who have hired him. He allows Smilla to ship out on Kronos disguised as a stewardess.

Ravn

A man who presents himself as an investigator for the district attorney, Ravn actually works in the fraud division. His involvement in the case becomes more complicated when it is revealed that his daughter was involved with the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark and has died in a manner suspiciously like that of Isaiah.

Urs

Urs is the cook on the Kronos. He has served time for smuggling, and Smilla uses this information to force more information from him about the Kronos.

Verlaine

First mate of the Kronos, Verlaine is also a drug smuggler working in cooperation with Tørk. It is he who murders Jakkelsen and tries repeatedly to murder Smilla.

David Ving

Ving is the lawyer and CPA who works with Loyen and Tørk in their cover-up of the earlier expedition and the death of Isaiah's father. Ving picks up Isaiah periodically to take him for medical checkups with Loyen. In addition, Ving is the one who has arranged Juliane and Isaiah's housing and stipend. He is also the one who has hired Føjl to keep an eye on them and, by extension, Smilla.

Themes

Mathematics

Mathematics may seem like an unlikely theme for a book that is about the murder of a young child and the dangerous path the narrator must take to discover the motives of those responsible for the murder. Yet Smilla's Sense of Snow is nothing if not unpredictable. Smilla finds in mathematics the certainty and stability she lacks in herself. She says, "I'm not perfect. 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." In addition, when Smilla first meets Isaiah, she reads to him from Euclid's Elements. Smilla says, "There is the feeling that always comes over me at the mere thought of that book: veneration. The knowledge that it is the foundation, the boundary. That if you work your way backwards, past Lobachevsky and Newton and as far back as you can go, you end up at Euclid." Smilla's two great skills are reading snow and direction, two geometrically determined skills. The crystalline structure of a snowflake can be mathematically determined and predicted with absolute regularity in spite of its infinite variety. In addition, navigation requires an intuitive sense of vectors and angles. Tellingly, Smilla's "soul brother" is Newton, not Einstein. Newton's notion of "Absolute Space" is necessary for Smilla's navigation of the world. When she ventures out into the Einsteinian paradoxes of time and space, she loses her orientation. Out on the ice, which she knows so well, the novel ends unresolved as Smilla flings herself after the villain, leaving foundation and mathematics behind.

Colonialism

One of Høeg's major concerns in Smilla's Sense of Snow is the relationship between Denmark and its former colony Greenland. Through Smilla, Høeg recounts the history of this relationship, beginning first in the eighteenth century when the Royal Greenland Trading Company set up a highly protective system of trade with Greenland. As such, the raw materials of the island became the sole property of Denmark, and Greenland became a colony.

The notion of "colonialism," however, is tied up with much more than the history of one nation claiming another as a colony. Rather, it is an exploration of the effects of this relationship on both the colonizer and the colonized. In Smilla's Sense of Snow, the days of Greenland as a colony have passed; at the time of the writing of the novel, Greenland was under Home Rule. However, two centuries of colonial exploitation, as well as the two decades of "modernization" that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, have changed the way that both Greenlanders and Danes think and live.

Smilla informs the reader that in 1964, "The old blatantly colonial policy for Greenland was abandoned…. Making room for the policies of the sixties—the educating of Northern Danes to equal rights." Ironically, the "education" of the Greenlanders took place in Danish, and during the "modernization" large-scale relocation of people from small settlements to larger cities took place. It was also during this period that the Greenlandic language suffered significant destruction. Because so much of cultural identity is tied up with language, the surest way a colonizer can destroy a culture is to limit the use of the native language and insist on the use of the colonizer's language. As Smilla notes, "All money in Greenland is attached to the Danish language and culture. Those who master Danish get the lucrative positions. The others can languish in the filet factories or in unemployment lines. In a culture that has a murder rate comparable to a war zone."

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to understand colonization as an unambiguously negative event. Indeed, it is the paradox of colonialism that renders any understanding of the situation so very difficult. As Smilla herself reports, "The problem with trying to hate the colonization of Greenland with a pure hatred is that, no matter what you may detest about it, the colonization irrefutably improved the material needs of an existence that was one of the most difficult in the world." It is within this paradox that Smilla finds herself trapped: neither fish nor fowl, neither Inuit nor Dane, she struggles to understand both sides of her heritage.

Alienation

Perhaps the most profoundly felt theme running through Smilla's Sense of Snow is that of alienation. When a people, or a person, lose(s) a sense of meaning in life or a separation from that which has formerly nurtured them, the result is both a cultural and personal sense of alienation. In many ways, Smilla exemplifies both. Clearly, Smilla is alienated both from her father and Danish society. She often pulls her telephone from its jack and disconnects her doorbell so that she does not have to interact with others in Copenhagen. The root of this alienation is in her forcible transfer from Greenland to Copenhagen after the death of her mother. That she runs away more times than she can remember between the ages of seven and twelve speaks to this deeply felt sense of cultural isolation. By the time she is an adult, Smilla has resigned herself to living at least partially within Danish culture: "I no longer make an effort to keep Europe or Denmark at a distance. Neither do I plead with them to stay. In some way they are part of my destiny. They come and go in my life. I have given up doing anything about it." However, this is the voice of resignation, not integration; even as an adult, Smilla remains alienated from and unable to find meaning in Denmark or Europe.

Smilla's alienation from the culture of her father, however, is not the most distressing alienation in the book. Much earlier, as a small child living with her mother in Greenland, she experiences an even deeper form of alienation. She recalls a hunting and fishing trip she took with her mother and her inability to kill the birds she had trapped:

The year after—the year before she disappeared—I began to feel nauseated when I went fishing. I was then about six years old. Not old enough to speculate about the reason. But old enough to understand that it was a feeling of alienation toward nature. That some part of it was no longer accessible to me in the natural way that it had been before.

It is this alienation that is truly tragic: Smilla cannot find a place to stand in either Inuit or Danish culture.

Topics for Further Study

• Read a short history of the Danish colonization of Greenland in an encyclopedia or another source. Imagine the story of the colonization told from the viewpoint of an Inuit. How do you think the accounts would differ?
• Watch the film version of Smilla's Sense of Snow and note how director Bille August chooses to portray the story. What are some of the ways the film conveys the main themes of the novel? Does the film seem "true" to the novel, or are there inexplicable changes?
• Read Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith, a murder mystery that takes place on a fishing boat near the Arctic Circle. What similarities and differences can you find between the two books?
• In what ways do the needs and concerns of Inuit people both clash and coincide with environmental issues? For example, the Inuit traditionally hunt whales, many species of which are endangered. Ought indigenous people be able to follow their traditional ways of living? Or do the needs of the environment outweigh the needs of the culture? How have nations such as Canada and Russia handled this question?
• Smilla's mother, although dead for many years, continues to play an important role in Smilla's life. How has Ane influenced her daughter over the years? How do you think Smilla will come to terms with her mixed heritage?
• Reread the book, noting all references to mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Look up the names of each mathematician and philosopher and learn something about their ideas. How do these allusions contribute to your understanding of Smilla as a character?

On a personal level, however, alienation serves as a defense mechanism for Smilla. Because she keeps everyone at a distance, claiming no people or place as her home, she is able to protect herself from being hurt. Tellingly, her affair with Føjl both awakens her and frightens her. Love, after all, is the cure for all alienation; yet it is the beloved who has the power to wreak the most damage. Likewise, her greatest fear of Tørk is not that he might kill her but that he knows her: "It's the realization that he knew who I was from the very beginning that is so excruciating. Not since my childhood have I felt so strongly in someone else's power." Thus, both knowing and being known occupy the dangerous flip side to the emptiness of alienation and provoke one of the driving questions of the book: is it better to live numbly, without meaning, in a state of alienation, or to live painfully, in the fear that meaning will disappear once found?

Style

Genre

The term "genre" refers to the category of a given literary work in either form or content. In terms of content, certain genres carry with them certain conventions. For example, detective fiction requires both a crime and someone trying to solve the crime. Thus, while a book such as Smilla's Sense of Snow is clearly generically a novel, it does not easily fall into any one generic category in terms of content and convention. Indeed, it is almost as if Høeg is playing with the notion of genre itself in his creation of this novel.

The story opens with the trappings of a murder mystery: a death under mysterious circumstances, a protagonist with the information and motive she needs to begin an investigation, a multitude of clues, and a cast of interesting and diverse characters. At the same time, the novel is also of the "thriller/suspense" genre. Because neither Smilla nor the reader has enough information at any one time to solve the case, she is constantly in danger. She cannot know whom to trust. The novel is also a love story, with the unlikely pair of Smilla and Føjl filling the roles of the lovers. The novel is at once tender and tough. Readers who are familiar with conventional love stories expect the relationship between the two to redeem both of them. Høeg dashes this expectation by revealing near the end of the book that Føjl has been collaborating with the villains. Nevertheless, he still appears to love Smilla, and Smilla perhaps continues to love him.

Less obviously, the novel is also a philosophical essay on the nature of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. Through her ruminations, Smilla reveals that she is engaged in a quest for meaning, looking to philosophy and science to provide her with the answers her experience does not. The novel also functions as both a history and an indictment of Danish colonial policy in Greenland. It is the story of a disenfranchised "other" in the shape of Smilla, a woman who cannot find a place to belong in either culture of her heritage. The book clearly abhors the effects of Western technological capitalism on the environment and the people of the Arctic. The novel then morphs once again and becomes a science fiction thriller, a novel about a strange, alien meteorite and potentially lethal life forms that have killed before and will kill again.

By the end of the novel, Høeg has deliberately destroyed all generic expectations of the reader. For some, these generic twists and turns are both troubling and confusing, as critical comments indicate. However, Høeg's refusal to allow his novel to be generically classified mirrors Smilla's refusal to be classified by ethnicity, gender, or age. As a result, Høeg has produced a postmodern novel that continually slips its boundaries, just as Smilla slips hers.

Setting

Perhaps the most striking feature of Smilla's Sense of Snow is its setting. From the deep cold of the Danish winter in the opening scene to the last desperate skate across the ice in Greenland, Høeg uses precise and concrete language to evoke a sense of coldness, ice, and snow, which mirrors Smilla's sense of isolation and alienation.

Specifically, Høeg chooses three separate settings for his novel. The first is the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. For Smilla, the Danish winter is colder than anything she experiences in Greenland. The coldness of urban life also affects her deeply; she lives in an impersonal apartment building called "The White Palace," a place where people can live side by side and never know each other's names. For the transplanted Greenlanders, Copenhagen is a kind of prison, a place where they endure social and physical coldness.

The second section of the book takes place on the open ocean of the North Atlantic. For Smilla, this setting is even more dangerous and frightening than Copenhagen. Ironically, she does not like the sea, although she has grown up with people whose livelihoods come from the sea. The Kronos, the ship that transports Smilla from Europe to Greenland, becomes the site of transition for Smilla, a place where she drops her fancy clothes and the veneer of civilization and takes on the clothing of the survivor. In many ways, Smilla loses her footing while she nearly loses her life on the ship; she is much more comfortable with ice than water. For Smilla, the ice is a known and predictable quantity, the crystals shaped into regular and mathematically identifiable crystals. The sea, on the other hand, is always moving, always unpredictable. Likewise, although Smilla has learned how to deal with the Danes in Copenhagen, when she finds herself on the Kronos, she discovers that the people aboard are as unpredictable and as dangerous as the ocean itself.

The last section of the novel takes place on the ice of Greenland. Again, Høeg evokes the bitter cold and the alien strangeness of the frozen land. Smilla, however, finds herself on surer footing here. Not only does she have the scientific knowledge of snow and ice that she has learned in Europe, she has the intuitive knowledge of her upbringing. In the final desperate scene, it is Smilla's familiarity with the setting that promises her survival:

The ice has its own nocturnal hospitality. I have no flashlight now, but I'm running as if it were a level road. Without difficulty, with confidence. My kamiks grip the snow in a different way than his boots do.

In the end, it is the setting itself that appears about to kill Tørk: "His strength is about to give out. If you haven't grown up in this landscape, it uses up your strength." The novel ends on the ice, in the dark, without resolution. And at the end, it is the evocation of the story's setting that continues to resonate with the reader long after the closing paragraph.

Historical Context

Understanding the cultural and historical relationship between Greenland and Denmark is essential for an understanding of Smilla's Sense of Snow. Although Denmark had granted Greenland Home Rule in 1979, a decade before Høeg began writing his novel, the events leading to this political decision as well as the aftermath of the Home Rule act deeply inform the events of the novel.

People have lived on the island of Greenland for about four thousand years. The first Europeans reached Greenland about 985 CE, when Norwegians settled in two farming colonies. For unknown reasons, these colonies died out. Speculation among scientists suggests that disease or climatic catastrophe may have caused the demise of the Norwegian colonies, a tantalizing link to Høeg's concept of "neocatastrophism." Indeed, Høeg's use of a giant meteorite as a plot device hints at the possibility of climatic change, while his creation of a fatal parasitic worm suggests that this might have been the cause of the failure of Europeans to sustain life on Greenland. Certainly, Høeg seems to be suggesting that contemporary Europeans ought to take care with what they are willing to unleash on the rest of the world.

There is evidence that the early Europeans had contact with the Inuit people as early as the first settlements. In the sixteenth century, explorers and whalers regularly visited Greenland and had dealings with the Inuit. However, permanent contact was not established until the eighteenth century when Hans Egede traveled to the west coast of Greenland, trying to find the earlier settlements. A Danish-Norwegian priest, Egede acted as both missionary and trader. He and his missionaries learned Inuit and succeeded in converting the indigenous people to Christianity. In 1776, the Danish government established the Royal Greenland Trade Company to control trade with Greenland. For two hundred years, Denmark exerted colonial rule of Greenland, keeping the island both isolated and protected.

Ironically, the abolishment of the colonial relationship in the early 1950s damaged Inuit culture perhaps more than colonization itself. Smilla comments on this period frequently; during the 1950s and 1960s, Greenlanders were considered "Northern Danes" and, as such, beneficiaries of social reform and modernization in the areas of health, education, and welfare. While this led to opportunities for many Greenlanders, it also damaged the language, since "Northern Danes" were expected to learn Danish in school and conduct their affairs in Danish. Many Inuit were forced to leave their traditional homes and ways of life in the Danish effort to move them into the twentieth century.

In Smilla's Sense of Snow, the reader learns that Smilla was a member of the Young Greenlander's Council, a group in Denmark comprised of Greenlandic students and dedicated to Home Rule for Greenland. As a result of pressure from this and other radical groups, Denmark established a Home Rule Commission in 1975, and by 1979 Home Rule had been established. Remarkably, the Greenlandic Inuit were the first Inuit people to rule themselves around the world after the advent of colonialism.

As Høeg points out through Smilla, however, even Home Rule is a paradoxical condition. It presupposes that the Inuit adopt European models of self-rule, with a parliament and central government. Smilla herself sees that Danish involvement in Inuit life is neither clearly good nor evil. Although the introduction of Western technology into Greenland destroyed much of the traditional way of life for the Inuit, as well as destroying many Inuit through disease and alcoholism, the material conditions of the Inuit have improved. Høeg gives Smilla these words to express the paradox:

The problem with trying to hate the colonization of Greenland with a pure hatred is that, no matter what you may detest about it, the colonization irrefutably improved the material needs of an existence that was one of the most difficult in the world.

Høeg succeeds, then, in initiating the reader into the complexities of the colonial relationship and clearly leads the reader to consider the fate of other polar people across the world. Thus, without historical and cultural background information, the reader loses some of the richness of Smilla's Sense of Snow as a postcolonial novel.

Critical Overview

Smilla's Sense of Snow met with both critical and popular praise upon its publication in Danish in 1992 and in English in 1993. In addition to being on many bestseller lists, the novel was reviewed in all major newspapers and magazines in the United States. Most critics hail the book as one of the most important novels to emerge at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, reviewers commonly compare Høeg to such major writers as John Le Carré, Martin Cruz Smith, Graham Greene, and even Joseph Conrad. While critics agree generally that the novel is of exceptional quality, they nonetheless find that quality in different places. For some, the success of the novel rests in Høeg's construction of the character of Smilla. For others, the plot itself drives the novel. For still other reviewers, the political ramifications of the relationship between Denmark and Greenland are at the core of the book. And for another group of critics, the postmodern characteristics of the novel make it a book worth studying.

Pearl Bell, writing in Partisan Review, for example, praises the characterization of Smilla, calling her "truculent, ferociously opinionated, erudite, disorganized, [and a] strangely beguiling woman." Likewise, Lesley Hazelton in the Seattle Times writes this of Smilla:

Bravo Smilla: tough and vulnerable, intelligent and emotional, rational and impulsive, she's her own person,

a full person. This Danish writer scarcely takes a false step in creating a multifaceted, believable, brave woman—an amazing achievement when you consider how confused and alienated most American male writers are about women.

Those critics who focus on the plot of the novel include Brad Leithauser in the New Republic who writes that Høeg handles "with great deftness" the task of creating a plot for a thriller with "artistic freshness." Richard Eder, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, calls "the sinuous turns of [Høeg's] story deeply engrossing," although Eder is not fully satisfied with the book's ending, suggesting that it does not quite make sense. Robert Nathan in the New York Times Book Review also praises Smilla for both its suspense and "exploration of the heart."

Perhaps the largest group of critics are fascinated by the postcolonial themes of the book and the way Høeg depicts relationships between the Danes and the Greenlanders. Julian Loose in the London Review of Books suggests that "what lifts Miss Smilla above the ordinary is Høeg's sense of how mixed motives have grotesquely deformed the unequal relationship of Denmark and Greenland." Novelist Jane Smiley, in a review appearing in the Washington Post, points to the "broader political issues, especially the meanings of borders and boundaries between countries and cultures" in Høeg's evocation of the postcolonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. Likewise, William A. Henry writes in People that Smilla is "at a deeper level … about cultural collisions between the industrial world and more primal places that have fallen under Western sway." Finally, in an interesting review in the Montreal Gazette, Merilyn Simonds likens the misunderstandings between the Danes and the Greenlanders to the misunderstandings between Canadians and Inuits living in Canada.

Although some critics find fault with the novel because they have a difficult time classifying it generically, others find this generic fluidity to be a strength, as well as being indicative of postmodern literature. Hans Henrik Møller in an excellent article appearing in Scandinavian Studies, for example, identifies Høeg's work as a "pastiche," or a collection of "leftovers." In this, he argues, Høeg's work is bound both to "the literary past" as well to "post-modern écriture." Likewise, Jim McCue, reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, applauds Høeg for the books indeterminacy: "Melo-drama and slapstick, epic journey and social indictment: the book proudly declines to limit itself."

It is likely that Smilla's Sense of Snow will continue to generate critical interest. As a generic hybrid and as an example of postmodernity, the novel elicits a different response with each reading. The wide critical understanding of the book speaks both to its importance as well as its multidimensionality.

Criticism

Diane Henningfeld

Henningfeld is a professor of English literature and composition who has written widely for educational and academic publishers. In this essay, Henningfeld considers Smilla's Sense of Snow as a postmodern epic.

In an article for Scandinavian Studies, Hans Henrik Møller considers Peter Høeg's work, arguing that it is a "pastiche." According to the writer, pastiche comes from the Italian word for leftovers recombined into a pie. He argues that "pastiche is a radical illustration of the precept that there is nothing new under the sun." Certainly, Smilla's Sense of Snow fits this description: part suspense thriller, part philosophical treatise, part science fiction story, part psychological study, part postcolonial political novel, the novel does not slip easily into classification. Møller further argues, "Pastiche binds Peter Høeg's writing to the literary past: his books and stories are replete with traces of Karen Blixen, Joseph Conrad and other great and well known authors. It links his growing oeuvre to postmodern écriture…. Pastiche is, moreover an exploration of time and the act of storytelling, of re-finding and renewal." Again, Smilla's Sense of Snow provides a perfect illustration for these notions. This essay, then, will demonstrate the way that Høeg connects to his literary past through his use of the epic heroic journey and how he manipulates and subverts the journey of the hero in his creation of a postmodern pastiche.

Certainly, one of the most foundational and familiar of all storytelling in Western culture is the epic quest. The Odyssey and The Iliad provide classic examples of the genre, and Gawain and the Green Knight is a well-known early English example. Indeed, the genre is so fundamental to the Western understanding of literature that many writers, including Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Northrup Frye, have identified archetypal characters and structural patterns that function across cultures. To review briefly, the hero is both brave and wise and often the child of an unusual birth. This hero may not recognize himself as a hero (the classic hero is always male) but, through his reluctant acceptance of a challenge, he undertakes a quest that proves his mettle. On this quest, he encounters helpers, tricksters, and figures of evil. Often, his quest requires travel under difficult circumstances. Many attempts are made on his life. Often, the hero is in quest of some valuable and/or mysterious object or is in search of his father. There is always some sort of psychological and physical movement, and the hero often experiences a symbolic death/rebirth experience.

Even on first reflection, there are clearly a number of ways that Smilla's Sense of Snow draws on and uses the epic tradition. Smilla, the protagonist, is both brave and wise. Høeg provides ample evidence that she is a brilliant woman, allowing her to share in her own voice what she knows about life, about mathematics, and about ice. She is an expert in her field, and it is her knowledge of both navigation and ice that allows her to survive in an alien landscape. Certainly, she demonstrates her bravery many times throughout the novel. For example, although Smilla tells the reader directly that she is afraid of open ocean, she nevertheless boards the Kronos, a vessel filled with dangerous characters, in order to dig into the truth about Isaiah's death. Furthermore, as the daughter of an Inuit and a European, Smilla's birth in Greenland and her subsequent removal to Denmark qualifies as an unusual background.

There are still other similarities. When Isaiah dies at the opening of the book, Smilla understands that she has an unspoken promise to fulfill: "All along I must have had a comprehensive pact with Isaiah not to leave him in the lurch, never, not even now." It is this pact that begins Smilla's quest through the labyrinth of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark and finally leads her out to the open ocean and back to her homeland of Greenland. Like a quest hero, Smilla has helpers on her journey. Peter Føjl, the mechanic, provides her with care, information, and love. Jean Pierre Lagermann gives her information about Isaiah's autopsy and about the parasite. Lukas, the captain of the Kronos, also reluctantly helps her by allowing her to come on board the ship in the guise of a stewardess.

Smilla nearly dies when she goes to the Arctic Museum and a bomb explodes. She escapes by swimming underwater, a symbolic rebirth. When she emerges from the water, her resolve is firm: she will find the answers she seeks.

Tricksters also abound in the book. Moritz's wife, Benja, fills the role by calling the police on Smilla when she is at their house, causing Smilla to flee. Jakkelsen on the Kronos is also a trickster, someone who is not what he seems. After their initial encounter, however, Smilla and he reach an uneasy truce and a strange alliance.

For Smilla, the purpose of the quest is to understand why Isaiah was killed. This information is bound up in the quest for the strange meteorite that gives off heat in the Arctic north. Isaiah's death is inextricably connected to the meteorite that seems to be alive and to the parasite that kills its host. Indeed, the quest for information and the quest for the meteorite merge in the final pages of the book.

Finally, Smilla fights against forces of evil. Tørk, the grand villain, is bent on recovering the meteorite for fame and fortune, regardless of the havoc the accompanying parasite wreaks on the rest of the world. In the final climactic scene, Smilla confronts Tørk, as any good epic hero would do.

However, while it is possible to find the archetypal epic structures in the novel, closer inspection reveals that Høeg has played with these archetypes, just as he has played with generic conventions, to such an extent that he undermines the entire epic project, the triumph of the hero over evil.

In the first place, Høeg plays with conventions of gender. As noted earlier, the classic epic hero is always male, and often a male in search of his father. Although Smilla is a woman, she does not even fit easily into that role. Her area of expertise is a male-dominated field. She is aggressive and bold in sex and causes trouble everywhere she goes. Throughout the book, it seems clear that Smilla is in search not of her father but of her mother. Again, Høeg plays with notions of gender by creating Smilla's mother as an androgynous Inuit hunter, a woman who nurses her child at her breast while demonstrating that her arms are as thick as a man's. It is her mother's knowledge and strength that Smilla emulates.

Høeg also creates a false helper for Smilla. Readers of epic literature expect a helper who will fight to the death for the hero. Føjl, Smilla's helper and lover, is not the helper of epic lore, but rather is a betrayer. He has collaborated with the forces of evil in order to help Tørk in his quest. Even here, however, the distinction is not clear. Føjl does not rest easily in the villain's camp; he was devoted to Isaiah and to Smilla, in spite of his duplicitousness. Moreover, Smilla does not seem to be able to reject the mechanic out of hand, even when she sees his betrayal.

Tørk, as the villain, also seems to blur in and out of focus. Smilla finds him breathtakingly handsome and finds herself attracted to him in spite of his murderous intentions. Høeg goes so far as to almost create Smilla's doppelganger, or double, in Tørk: a lonely, precocious child, looking for love, fame, and attention, just like Smilla, who runs away more times than she can count before she is twelve years old. In the final scene, the pair are both running across the ice, each on his or her path to salvation or destruction.

There are other, less obvious details as well. A common motif in the epic quest is the arming of the hero. Gawain and the Green Knight provides a well-known example as Gawain puts on his armor as he is about to leave on his search for the Green Knight. In Smilla's Sense of Snow, however, Høeg provides an ironic reversal. In Denmark, Smilla is always dressed extravagantly; indeed, her expensive, high-class clothing often allows her to do battle with the Danish establishment. On board the ship, however, as she prepares for what will be her final battle with Tørk, rather than going through an elaborate arming ritual, she takes off her clothing and examines her wounds:

Anyone interested in death would benefit from looking at me. I've taken off my bandages. There's no skin on my kneecaps. Between my hips there is a wide yellowish-blue patch of blood that has coagulated under the skin where Jakkelsen's marlinspike struck me. The palms of both hands have suppurating lesions that refuse to close. At the base of my skull I have a bruise like a gull's egg…. I've been modest enough to keep on my white socks so you can't see my swollen ankle.

It is the ending of the novel, however, that most undermines epic conventions. Most quest stories are of the out and back type. That is, the hero leaves on his quest, defeats evil, retrieves the item of value, and returns to tell his tale, a wiser and stronger man. Høeg both manipulates and subverts this form. The book closes with Smilla tracking Tørk across the snow, herding him onto thinner and thinner ice. Although Smilla knows some of the details of Isaiah's death, she still does not know the truth of it nor the truth of the mysterious meteorite, which will remain where it is, nor the truth of her lover, the mechanic. "Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic." She considers the story she will tell on her return. Unlike the triumphant tale of the returning hero, however, her tale is one that signifies nothing:

Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

By choosing to end his book but not resolve it, Høeg demonstrates the postmodern condition, a condition that allows only pastiche, not epic, only ambiguity, not certainty. Although Smilla can read the ice, she cannot read the truth. As such, she is the postmodern hero, still struggling to find meaning in a darkening world of ice and snow.

Source: Diane Henningfeld, Critical Essay on Smilla's Sense of Snow, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Mary Kay Norseng

In the following essay, Norseng explores Høeg's authorial motive in the denouement of Smilla's Sense of Snow.

As Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (Smilla's Sense of Snow) begins to end, if never to resolve itself, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen sets sail for an arctic sea far, far away. In that sea lies as island; on that island there is a glacial cathedral; in that cathedral there is a lake; in that lake there is a black stone; in that stone there is a worm. "Mennesker venter på denne sten. Deres tro og forventning vil gøre den virkelig. Vil gøre den levende, uanset hvordan det ellers forholder sig med den" ("People are waiting for this stone. Their belief and anticipation will make it real. They will make it alive regardless of the true nature of the stone." Tørk, the fictional, murderous plot maker is speaking to Smilla, near the finale, about the public he fully intends to exploit. Is the voice of his creator, Peter Høeg, an equally murderous plot maker, to be heard under Tørk's, albeit with a potentially different public in mind? Inevitably, it would seem, in a novel as self-consciously wrought as this one. Tørk speaks with utter cynicism about our need to believe in the sensational power of the stone. Does Høeg, a most sophisticated, cosmopolitan writer, speak with equal conviction about the need of his late twentieth-century reading public still to believe in the sensational power of the fiction? Does he taunt us, even as he entertains us, with the emptiness of the post-modern novel? Or does he strive to fill it up again? And if so, at what price? Does it become, like Tørk's stone, the commodity in which, in Walter Benjamin's words, "hell rages"? And again, if so, what is that "hell"?

A stone in a lake in an ice cave on an island in an arctic sea far, far away mimics an ancient riddle in Scandinavian folklore. "Langt, langt borte i et vann ligger en øy," sa han; "på den øya står en kirke; i den kirken er en brønn, i den brønnen svømmer en and; i den anda er et egg og i det egget—der er hjertet mitt, du."

("Far, far away in a lake lies an island," he said; "on that island there's a church; in that church there's a well, in that well swims a duck; in that duck there's an egg, and in that egg—that's where my heart is").

This is the riddle at the heart of the Norwegian folk tale, "Risen som ikke hadde noe hjertet på seg" (The Giant Who Had No Heart in Him). Askeladd must find the Giant's heart in order to bring his brothers and their brides, turned into stone by the Giant, back to life. What takes Smilla five hundred pages takes Askeladd two paragraphs in the Asbjørnsen and Moe tale. Finally holding the egg enveloping the Giant's heart in his hand, Askeladd squeezes. The Giant cries out in pain. "Klem én gang til" (Squeeze again), says Askeladd's helpful sidekick, the Wolf. The Giant begs for his life, agreeing to do whatever Askeladd wants. "Si at dersom han skaper om igjen de seks brødrene dine som han har gjort til stein, og brudene deres, skal han berge livet" (Say that if he brings back your six brothers that he has turned into stone, and their wives, he'll save his life), says the Wolf. The Giant immediately turns stone back into flesh. "Klem nå sund egget" (Now crush the egg), says the Wolf. Without hesitation, Askeladd breaks the egg, and the Giant's heart bursts.

Is there a heart in this novel, and if there is, does Høeg break it? Without much ado, we can certainly say that he breaks the heart of any notion of "traditional" closure, quite literally and quite figuratively putting the worm in the stone of the ending, in keeping with post modernism's aesthetic of failure and fragmentation. And, indeed, the critic in us may thrill to Smilla's theoretical correctness. But the reader in us experiences, along with many others, a dismay as the novel disintegrates, as the philosophical, European detective fiction spins seemingly out of control into a Hollywood action-adventure script. Or as one reviewer wrote:.

Something peculiar happens to Smilla's Sense of Snow as it sails toward its denouement … (It) takes on the trappings of movies like The Blob (whose extraterrestrial predator, one recalls, was shipped to the Arctic), The Thing (whose monster preyed on the inhabitants of an Arctic station) and Them (which evoked a world threatened by genetic mutation).

The amorphic movie titles do, indeed, capture exponentially the "appearance," if not the "essence" of the second and third parts of Smilla, "Havet" ("The Sea") and "Isen" ("The Ice"). Typically, Høeg gives us warning of the direction his narrative will take once he and Smilla have left the landscape of "Byen" or "The City." Only a few hours after Smilla has gone on board the ship, less than a minute in fictional time, s/he muses:

Jeg har altid vaeret bange for havet … På det åbne hav findes der ingen landkending, der findes kun en amorf, kaotisk forskydning af retningsløse vandmasser, der tårner sig op og bryder og ruller, og hvis overflade igen brydes af subsystemer der interferer og danner hvirvler og forsvinder og opstår og tilsidst forgår sporløst … Jeg frygter (havet) fordi det vil fratage mig orienteringen, mit livs indre gyroskop, min vished om, hvad der er op og ned, min forbindelse med absolute space … Fra jeg for nogle timer siden er gået om bord, er nedbrydningen sat ind.

I've always been afraid of the sea … On the open sea there are no landmarks, there is only an amorphous, chaotic shifting of directionless masses of water that loom up and break and roll, and their surface is, in turn, broken by subsystems that interfere and form whirlpools and appear and disappear and finally vanish without a trace … I'm afraid of (the sea) because it will rob me of my orientation, the inner gyroscope of my life, my awareness of what is up and down, my connection to Absolute Space … The process of disintegration started the moment I came on board several hours ago.

Smilla's loss of connection is reflected everywhere in the fiction henceforward. Characters and events become increasingly anarchic, narrative rhythm grows fitful, suspense ebbs and flows, and the images of the fictional landscape lose both color and contour, until in the final scene a white fog of frost is descending, the heroine is losing sight of the villain, the villain is losing his bearings, the ice is thinning, the temperature is dropping, and an obliterating snow storm is coming, returning all, we might say, to the blank page. As if we have entered into some other, inchoate dimension, philosophically as well as imagistically, we are left to ponder, after all this time, whether Smilla's words are pretentious or profound, empty or full of meaning.

Man kan ikke vinde over isen.

Bag os er stadig stenen, dens gåde, de spørgsmål den bar rejst. Og mekanikeren.

Et sted foran mig bliver den løbende skikkelse langsomt mørkere.

Fortael os, vil de komme og sige til mig. Så vi forstår og kan afslutte. De tager fejl. Det er kun det man ikke forstår, man kan afslutte. Det kommer ikke til nogen afgørelse.

You can't win against the ice.

Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic.

Somewhere ahead of me the running figure slowly grows darker.

Tell us, they'll say to me. So we will understand and be able to resolve things. They'll be mistaken. It's only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution.

Does Høeg in the end, like some post-modern Askeladd, break our collective, bourgeois heart? Or has he hidden a heart elsewhere, as the Giant did twice before he was outwitted by the intrepid hero? It would certainly be in keeping with Høeg's fascination with the paradoxical that he play both roles. The folk tale that informs the final phase of the novel is, at least from one point of view, a tale of rebirth. Askeladd tricks the Giant into bringing his family of brothers back to life. Upon my first reading of Smilla the existential thriller, even the extraordinary heroine, even at times the devastating social critique, seemed like masks, Trojan horses, Askeladdian tricks that allowed Høeg to write what he indicated he was writing from the very beginning, a narrative of mourning, a tale of death, loss, and depression, and equally of those flashes of clarity, of white-hot purpose, of the keen sense of being on some right track, as one attempts to trick the Giant, to restore what has been lost, the one who has been lost, if only in another form.

Høeg concludes Smilla with his own riddle. "Det er kun det man ikke forstår, man kan afslutte. Det kommer ikke til nogen afgørelse" ("It is only the things you don't understand that you can resolve. There will be no resolution"). In other words, contrary to what we think we have just read, we have understood it all. I would suggest that the novel is, at heart, about the most common, and the most devastating, of human experiences, those sorrows of loss that potentially wean us too soon from this earth. At the risk of being Tørk's fool—and there could be worse fates—the one who would find meaning where there is none, I offer a reading of this novel as a tale of mourning and renewal.

The Corpse

One could say that Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne is held in the embrace of a child. In the first narrative moments, barely acquainted with our guide, Smilla, we watch her catch sight of a small, dark shadow in the snow early on a December evening in Copenhagen. She runs toward it. The shadow is the corpse of the boy, Isaiah.

Esajas ligger med benene trukket op under sig, og med ansigtet ned i sneen og haenderne omkring hovedet, som skaermer han for den lille projektør der lyser på ham, som er sneen en rude gennem hvilken han har fået øje på noget dybt nede under jorden.

Isaiah is lying with his legs tucked up under him, with his face in the snow and his hands around his head, as if he were shielding himself from the little spotlight shining on him, as if the snow were a window through which he has caught sight of something deep inside the earth.

Nearly five hundred pages later, now all but a double of Smilla, we watch with her as Tørk, the murderer of Isaiah, runs out onto the thinner and thinner ice of the Greenlandic seas. She chases him, running parallel to him.

Han har mistet orienteringen. Han føres ud mod det åbne vand. Mod dér, hvor strømmen har udhulet isen, så den bliver tynd som en hinde, en fosterhinde, og under den er havet mørkt og salt som blod, og et ansigt presser sig nedefra op mod ishinden, det er Esajas' ansigt, den endnu Ufødte Esajas.

He's lost his bearings. He's being led out toward open water. Toward the spot where the current has hollowed out the ice so it's as thin as a membrane, a fetal membrane. Underneath, the sea is dark and salty like blood, and a face is pressing up against the icy membrane from below; it's Isaiah's face, the as-yetunborn Isaiah.

As if the text were the earth, Isaiah peers back at himself lying lifeless in the snow. How are we to read this fetal embrace? Is it a hole or a whole in a text that ends with the proclamation, "There will be no resolution"? Perhaps it is both, the everrepeated cycle of meaninglessness and meaning, the failed and the possible, loss and recovery, Isaiah's sooting vision, the vision of newborns and of the extremely old, the gaze of our common humanity, connecting the beginning to the end like a beam of light, providing, one might say, the Absolute Space of the story, the thing for which we long, to which we cling, even as we search for it.

In a review of Smilla for The New Statesman John Williams began by saying that "It's the corpse that defines a thriller." Isaiah as corpse is particularly poignant. The dead boy bears the name of the greatest of the prophets, who foretold of the coming of the Messiah. His was a prophecy of a paradoxical redemption, made manifest in both a suffering and a reigning Messiah. Does such a namesake have any meaning in a text as profane as this one? Smilla possibly casts doubt. Upon first meeting Elsa Lübing, the novel's elegant, oldfashioned, religious recluse, Smilla remarks, "Jeg har mistet fornemmelsen for, hvordan man tackler troende europaeere" ("I have lost the sense of how to tackle a believing European"). But Miss Lübing, a former "bookkeeping" genius from another era, a woman of conscience, even if she has withdrawn to her windowed penthouse of white and cream, lends credence to the Bible as text. It is the wisdom by which she lives, providing her not only with the language through which she speaks in her daily life, but the secret code through which she and Smilla communicate. Miss Lübing, with her Bible, gives Smilla one of the first keys to unlocking the mystery of Isaiah's death. Her ancient text may also provide a key to the meaning of Høeg's text as well.

Høeg's Isaiah might be said to be both prophet and prophecy. He is a Christ child of sorts, at the center of an albeit highly corrupted nativity myth. Smilla, the quintessential, 1990s vierge moderne,2 in spirit if not in body, thinks of Isaiah as her child. The mechanic, Peter Føjl, plays the carpenter to her Virgin Mary. They are this novel's unholy family. Isaiah dies in December and is fictionally about to be reborn about three months later, roughly corresponding to the Christian feast of the Resurrection. Oddly for a story set in Copenhagen, the boy is often placed by Smilla in an environment of shimmering heat, as if he were in a desert, and he is usually described as being naked, save for the underpants he wears like a loin cloth. His body is pierced by a modern sword, a biopsy needle. And, like Christ, Isaiah turns the other cheek. When lashed out at, abused, hurt, he digs into what Smilla calls "sin naturs ubegraensede reserver" ("the unlimited reserves of his character"). "Tålmodig, tavs, agtpågivende vred han sig bort under de udstrakte haender, og gik sin vej. For, om muligt, at finde en anden løsning" ("Patient, silent, and watchful he would wrench himself away from the outstretched hands and go on his way. In order to find, if possible, some other solution").

Smilla herself sees Isaiah as a potential savior of her cultures, as a Greenlander who could in essence incorporate Denmark, change it to his own, take it backward or forward to something more integrated and whole. Using imagery as eclectic as her boy-hero, she describes his response to her gift of a luxurious, white jacket. The resulting composite is of a hybrid phoenix.

Esajas var ved at lykkes. Han ville kunne vaere nået frem. Han ville kunne have optaget Danmark i sig, og transformeret det, og vaereblevet både-og.

Jeg fik syet en anorak til ham af hvid silke. Selve mønsteret havde passeret europaeerne. Min far havde engang fået det foraerende af maleren Gitz-Johansen. Han havde fået det i Nordgrønland, da han illustrerede det store standardvaerk om Grønlands fugle. Jeg gav Esajas den på, jeg friserede ham, og så løftede jeg ham op på toiletsaedet. Da han så sig selv i spejlet, skete det. Det tropiske tekstil, den grønlandske andagt ved festdragten, den danske glaede ved luksus, alt. smeltede sammen. Måske betød det også noget, at jeg havde givet ham den.

Isaiah was on the verge of success. He could have gotten ahead. He would have been able to absorb Denmark and transform it and become both a Dane and a Greenlander.

I had an anorak made for him out of white silk. Even the pattern had been passed down by Europeans. The painter Gitz-Johansen once gave it to my father. He had gotten it in North Greenland, when he was illustrating his great reference work on the birds of Greenland. I put the anorak on Isaiah, combed his hair, and then I lifted him up onto the toilet seat. When he saw himself in the mirror, that's when it happened. The tropical fabric, the Greenlandic respect for fine clothes, the Danish joy in luxury all merged together. Maybe it also meant something that I had given it to him.

The notion of Isaiah being on the verge of success seems blasphemous in a narrative in which he is the ultimate victim of late twentieth century, western culture, a culture of greed, power, and disregard for life. The child of the System's pawns, he is witness to his father's death by explosives and his mother's by alcohol. His body is infected with parasites and his hearing damaged by modern drugs. But as the Biblical Isaiah's Messiah was both sufferer and redeemer, so too is Smilla's young Isaiah both victim and savior, both hollowed out and whole.

One might, in fact, say that Isaiah is the emblematic child sufferer in a sea of suffering. In reviewing Høeg's recently published The History of Danish Dreams (1995) for Nation John Leonard writes:

How H(ø)eg hates this middle class, whose own children are a Third World, to be colonized, "civilized" and serfed. In his suspicion of science, technology and the very idea of progress, he belongs to a long tradition of those antirationalists who've gone swimming Against the Current … But H(ø)eg's distinctive contribution to this literature of disenchantment, of subversive subjectivity, is his brilliant focus on the lost child—coveted, abused, eroticized, missing, homeless, inner, emblematic, mode of production, consumer and commodity, Little Mermaid and Ugly Duckling—the orphan in the burning world. No wonder he needed Smilla … Smilla on her sleigh, who has fled us through dreaming ice to a Winter Palace.

Smilla may have fled. Nevertheless, these lost children lie like an endless chain of corpses on the landscape of Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. Like Isaiah they fall from the structures, through the fissures, not only through the corrupted world reflected through the narrative but through the narrative itself, through those expert discourses—economic, scientific, medical, philosophical, aesthetic—that are the building blocks of the fiction.

The novel is really a novel of nothing but children, their adult masks bleeding off like actor's paint, crooks, criminals, and good citizens alike, bleeding into children before Smilla's and our very eyes. Of the dead, to name just a few: Closest to Smilla is her younger brother, who committed suicide when he was forced to transform himself from hunter to dock sweeper, this younger brother, mentioned in an aside here and an aside there, more important in the narrative than he seems, connected somehow to Isaiah through the memory of the shimmering heat of a hot, arctic summer. And there is the investigative detective Ravn's daughter, pushed from another roof, also by Tørk, symbolic of all the children of any class who are forced by violence from the structures of power. Smilla's last communication to the "outside" world is to Ravn about his daughter, and the revenge she takes in the end is certainly in her name as well as Isaiah's. Of the living-dead: There is Benja, the lithe, emotionally stunted, thumbsucking darling of the Royal Ballet and Smilla's abusive doctor/father. There is Landers, the perpetually drunk casino owner whom Smilla calls "En affaldsbarn, en der altid har haft svaert ved at begå sig, og egentlig heller ikke har haft lyst til at laere det" ("A throwaway child, someone who has always had a hard time dealing with the world and hasn't actually wanted to learn how"). No one is exempt, not even the artists, perhaps most particularly not the artists. The murderer, Tørk Hviid, is himself a crucified child, the son of a "great" composer. As a mutual acquaintance condemningly writes to Smilla's father:

Drengen gik for lud og koldt vand. Huller i tøjet, rødøjet, fik aldrig en cykel, blev pryglet i den lokale proletarskole fordi han var for svag af sult til at forsvare sig. Fordi hans far skulle vaere stor kunstner. I har alle svigtet jeres børn. Og der skal en gammel svans som mig til at fortaelle jer det.

The boy was totally neglected. Holes in his clothes, red-eyed, never had a bicycle, was beaten at the local proletarian school because he was too weak from hunger to defend himself. Because (his father) was supposed to be a great artist. You've all betrayed your children. And it takes an old queen like me to tell you.

There is also Jakkelsen, the Kronos Captain's drug-addicted younger brother, whom Smilla calls the "sick child." He literally becomes the corpse in the cargo of the ship that takes Smilla to that (w)hole in the ice where she potentially wrecks her revenge on Tørk. Backing Smilla up like some farcical, glacial warrior, Jakkelsen's protective, yet impotent brother, the Captain, steps up behind her, harpoon gun in hand, pointed at Tørk. "Du skal blive gjort ansvarlig" ("You must be held responsible"), he says, just before his arm is shot off. And, of course, there is Smilla, the protagonist, the Greenlandic/Danish hybrid child, whose desires to sink back into her own childhood from the iceencrusted present continually wash over her like waters, sometimes troubled, sometimes calm, from a sea of memories, even as she pursues the murderer of her beloved child, Isaiah.

Wounded children killing wounded children, wounded children avenging wounded children is the underlying modus operandi of Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. In a novel more nakedly about the abused child in contemporary society, De måske egnede (1993), the novel that followed Smilla, Høeg quotes the god of modern physics who publicly mourned the death of his own childhood, at the same time as he consigned his infant daughter to a similar fate.

Da Einstein er blevet verdensberømt, og journalister spørger til hans opvaekst, refererer han flere gange selv til den som "liget af min barndom," "The corpse of my childhood".

Han siger at han sigter til den hårde, indskraenkende borgerlighed der omgav ham.

Det fremgår tydeligt af hans breve til Mileva Maric, at hans videnskabelige teorier udvikles i protest mod denne borgerlighed … Den indskraenkning han protesterede mod i sit arbejde, bornertheden, er samtidig den der får ham og Mileva Maric til at sende deres otte måneder gamle datter bort.

"The corpse of my childhood."

When Einstein has become world famous, and journalists ask about his youth, he himself refers to it several times as "the corpse of my childhood."

He says he is referring to the strict, inhibiting bourgeois mentality that surrounded him.

It is clear from his letters to Mileva Maric that his scientific theories are developed in protest against this bourgeois mentality … At the same time, the inhibition he protested against in his work, the narrowmindedness, is what causes him and Mileva Maric to give away their eight-month-old daughter.

"The corpse of my childhood."

How do we reverse the unending spiral of child corpses? At the heart of much of what Høeg writes is the question, "Can we do it differently?" Those who try, like the boy-murderer, August, in De måske egnede, who ends his own life rather than perpetuate the murderous cycle in which he is caught, are Høeg's twentieth-century, martyred heroes, his messiahs. In the end, as Smilla confronts Tørk on the ice, she recasts herself in the image of Isaiah.

Det er is der er under mig, jeg er på vej hen over isen, imod ham, som Esajas var på vej vaek fra ham. Det er som om jeg er Esajas. Men nu på vej tilbage. For at gøre noget om. For at prøve, om der skulle findes en anden mulighed.

There is ice under my feet. I'm on my way across the ice toward him, just as Isaiah was heading away from him. It's as if I am Isaiah. But on his way back now. To do something differently. To see whether there might be an alternative.

The recast Isaiah, the Smilla/Isaiah, would save the child. But which child?

The Character

Preliminarily it must be said that it is the dead child who saves the living, for to bring Isaiah back seems to mean bringing Smilla back, Smilla whose dark love affair with melancholy is far more seductive than her love affair with the mechanic. Death often startles us into living. Isaiah's death sharpens Smilla's senses, like a cup of the mechanic's scalding, tropical tea. She says herself that she has been set free.

Esajas' død er en uregelmaessighed, en spraengning der har fremkaldt en spalte. Den spalte har sluppet mig fri. For en kort tid, uden at jeg kan forklare hvordan, er jeg kommet i bevaegelse, er jeg blevet et skøjtende fremmedlegeme oven på isen.

Isaiah's death is an irregularity, an eruption that produced a fissure. That fissure has set me free. For a brief time, and I can't explain how, I have been set in motion, I have become a foreign body skating on top of the ice.

The death of one child becomes the lifeline of the other.

One can speak of Smilla in this way only, of course, if one can assume that a traditional notion of character has gone into the making of Smilla. Instinctively as readers we seem to believe in her as "real." Brad Leithauser wrote in his review in The New Republic:

At the outset of her tale I was aware that Smilla—as a European, an Eskimo and a woman—stood at three removes from a reader such as myself. All the more striking, then, was the speed with which the sense of distance from her vanished—the speed of arriving on intimate terms with her. And she accomplishes this without being at all forthcoming. She is a taciturn soul. We read nearly 100 pages before we discover that her passion for snow and ice derives not merely from experience but from scholarship. She is a glaciologist, with articles to her credit like "Statistics on Glacial Graphology" and "Mathematical Models for Brine Drainage from Seawater Ice." We believe in this heroine partly because her reticence in no way feels coy. It seems, rather, like the wariness of somebody who, having grown up surrounded by dangers, instinctively seeks to keep predators at bay.

Leithauser's observation touches only the tip of the iceberg. Reticence is Smilla's emotional veneer. Underneath she is a chronically lonely soul, subject to bouts of depression which she records, as only the true melancholic can, with irresistible allure, provoking our desire to follow her into her dark spaces. Depression, I would suggest, is the crack in the personality of this uncommon heroine that allows us, most likely so different from her in most ways, to identify so intuitively with her. Melancholy is, in a sense, our common bond.

For Smilla it seems tantamount to a lost love. Rather than fend it off, she courts it and embraces it with a determined abandon. Momentarily defeated in her search for Isaiah's murderer, she gives herself up to depression with these fighting words:.

Man kan forsøge at daekke over en depression på forskellige måder. Man kan høre Bachs orgelvaerker i Frelserkirken. Man kan laegge en bane højt humør i pulverform ud på et lommespejl med et barberblad, og tage den ind med et sugerør. Man kan råbe om hjaelp. For eksempel i telefonen, så man har sikret sig, hvem der hører det.

Det er den europaeiske vej. At håbe på, at man kan handle sig ud af problemerne.

Jeg tager den grønlandske vej. Den består i at gå ind i det sorte humør. At laegge sit nederlag under mikroskopet og dvaele ved synet.

Når det er rigtig galt—som nu—så ser jeg en sort tunnel foran mig. Den går jeg hen til. Jeg laegger mit paene tøj fra mig, mit undertøj, min sikkerhedshjelm og mit danske pas, og så går jeg ind i mørket.

Jeg véd der kommer et tog. Et blyforet damplokomotiv, der transporterer Strontium 90. Jeg går det i møde.

Det kan jeg gøre, fordi jeg er 37 år gammel. Jeg véd, at inde i tunnelen, inde under hjulene, nede mellem svellerne er der et lille punkt af lys.

You can try to cover up depression in various ways. You can listen to Bach's compositions for the organ in Our Saviour's Church. You can arrange a line of good cheer in powder form on a pocket mirror with a razor blade and ingest it with a straw. You can call for help. For instance, by telephone, so that you know who's listening.

That's the European method. Hoping to work your way out of problems through action.

I take the Greenlandic way. It consists of submerging yourself in the dark mood. Putting your defeat under a microscope and dwelling on the sight.

When things are really bad—like now—I picture a black tunnel in front of me. I go up to it. I strip off my nice clothes, my underwear, my hard hat, my Danish passport, and then I walk into the dark.

I know that a train is coming. A lead-lined steam locomotive transporting strontium 90. I go to meet it.

It's possible for me to do this because I'm thirty-seven years old. I know that inside the tunnel, underneath the wheels, down between the ties, there is a little spot of light.

Høeg has taken great pains to give his Smilla a psychologically provocative past, both in the broad sweeps of ancestry and family history and the smaller, more secretive movements of the "soul." During this particular dark mood, literally locked up in her Copenhagen apartment, she consciously evokes a memory that makes her black tunnel even blacker. It is the memory of her second attempt, at the age of twelve, to return to Greenland from Denmark, where her father had forcibly brought her after her mother's death six years prior. She remembers a frantic, winter flight northward, trying to reach Frederikshavn, and from there Oslo, and then Nuuk. First she hitchhikes, then she steals a motorcycle, skids, crashes on lake ice, tears her jacket, breaks her wrist bones, and lands in the hospital, where her father comes to retrieve her. Walking to the car she breaks away, he chases after her and catches her, and she turns on him, her right hand in a cast, her left hand hiding a scalpel that she had stolen from the emergency room. She gashes the palm of his hand. They circle around each other, both ready to strike, when Moritz suddenly straightens up and says, "Du ligner din mor … " ("You're just like your mother … "). And he starts to cry.

This scene, which begins Part Two of "The City," is key to the novel, an allegory of the greater narrative in which present and past play to and against each other in a drama that stays the same the more it changes. The paradigm of the wandering, violent journey northward, leaving Smilla bloodied but unbowed, is unmistakable. Embedded in it are the complex of forces that compel her to flee, be it to the expanse of the Arctic or to a small, dark room in Copenhagen. Her depression of the present, brought on by her momentary failure to uncover Isaiah's murderer and hence to recover Isaiah, is deeply anchored in the past, in her attempts to return to Greenland, both in body and in spirit, to the home of her mother.

John Bowlby, in his introduction to Loss: Sadness and Depression (1980), the third and final volume of his classic study on mourning, Attachment and Loss, noted that "bereave" stems from the same root as "rob." Building on earlier studies by Darwin and Strand, he assumed that the attempt of the bereft one to recover what has been lost is instinctive. " … a mourner is repeatedly seized, whether he knows it or not, by an urge to call for, to search for and to recover the lost person and … not infrequently he acts in accordance with that urge." In Loss he developed his theories of successful versus thwarted mourning, concentrating, in particular, on children who have lost a parent, either through death or separation. The mourning of children would, he contended, reveal the paradigm for adult mourning, which, he further contended, was often founded in childhood. If a child is allowed to/is able to suffer through grief in all its stages, s/he will recover from the loss, will recover what Darwin called "elasticity of mind," but if grieving is thwarted, s/he will be doomed to a repetitive, if disguised search for the dead beloved. Bowlby established an intimate connection between a recent and an earlier loss.

A probable explanation of the tendency for a recent loss to activate or reactivate grieving for a loss sustained earlier is that, when a person loses the figure to whom he is currently attached, it is natural for him to turn for comfort to an earlier attachment figure. If, however, the latter, for example a parent, is dead the pain of the earlier loss will be felt afresh (or possibly for the first time). Mourning the earlier loss therefore follows.

I would suggest that Smilla's search for Isaiah can be interpreted as a repetition of a "life-long," if disguised search for her lost mother. Smilla herself is keenly aware of the need in others to try to hold on to the dead beloved, even if that other is the father she so scorns. In ruminating about her flight toward Greenland, away from Denmark, she recognizes, as both a past and present truth, her father's need to keep her close in order to keep her mother, if only in memory, alive.

Til Danmark havde han hentet mig, fordi jeg var det eneste der kunne minde ham om, hvad han havde mistet. Mennesker der er forelskede, de tilbeder et fotografi. De ligger på knae for et tørklaede. De fore-tager en rejse for at se på en husmur. Hvad som helst der kan puste til de gløder, der både varmer og forbraender dem.

Med Mortiz var det vaerre. Han var håbløst forelsket i en, hvis molekyler var suget ud i den store tomhed. Hans kaerlighed havde opgivet håbet. Men den havde klamret sig til erindringen. Jeg var den erindring.

He had brought me to Denmark because I was the only thing that could remind him of what he had lost. People in love worship a photograph. They fall on their knees before a scarf. They make a journey to look at the wall of a building. Whatever can ignite the coals that both warm and sear them.

With Moritz it was much worse. He was hopelessly in love with someone whose molecules had been sucked out into the vast emptiness. His love had given up hope. But it had latched on to memory. I was that memory.

The thing that Smilla understands so well about her father, in fact the thing that allows her to understand her father at all, is the thing that drives her with equal ferocity, the need to recover someone who also for Smilla, with even more insidious consequences, was "suget ud i den store tomhed" ("sucked out into the vast emptiness"). What Moritz tries to do through his daughter, Smilla tries to do through her chosen son, Isaiah. After her failed flight at the age of twelve, she never again tried to escape, that is, until Isaiah was murdered. Her return to Greenland may be far more compulsive than the detective novel alone would allow. Smilla as the avenger of the dead child on one level of the narrative, is herself the thwarted child mourner on another.

Smilla was seven years old when her mother disappeared in the Greenlandic seas. The only trace of her was her kayak, which, according to Smilla, led her Inuit kin to conclude that "det havde vaeret en hvalros" ("it must have been a walrus"). There were no further details. Now in her thirty-seventh year, Smilla seems to have made peace with her mother's unknown demise as yet another hard, but natural fact of a hard life. But as so often with Smilla, things are not what they seem. In the context of telling of her mother's disappearance, Smilla detachedly cites two fascinating facts from her seemingly endless list of fascinating facts. First, in Danish waters, compared to Greenlandic waters, due to the warmer temperature, the processes of decomposition cause fermentation of the stomach, giving "selvmordere fornyet opdrift" ("suicides renewed buoyancy"), and causing them to wash up on shore. Second, walruses are unpredictable. They can be transformed from the most sensitive of fish to the most ferocious killers.

Med de to kindtaender kan de slå en skibsside af faergecement ind. Jeg har engang set fangerne holde en torsk hen til en hvalros de havde fanget levende. Den smalede laeberne til en lille kyssemund, og så sugede den fiskens kød direkte af knoglerne.

With their two tusks they can stave in the side of a ship made of ferrocement. I once saw hunters holding a cod up to a walrus that they had captured alive. The walrus puckered up his lips as for a kiss and then sucked the meat right off the bones of the fish.

These bits of knowledge are potentially interesting in and of themselves, as are so many of Smilla's multifarious observations. But we should not be folled. For surely they have a more provocative function in this story of Ane Qaavigaaq's demise. They devilize the unknown waters of her grave. They suggest that Smilla has entertained fantasies of a most violent death, or perhaps even worse for Smilla, a death by her mother's own hand, fantasies that Smilla can only allow herself to express through the detached formula of scientific facts. For the mourning child, Bowlby stressed, it is essential that the child be made aware of two things, "first that the dead parent will never return and secondly that his body is buried in the ground or burned to ashes." Smilla, denied certainty, even of this elementary kind, has lived for thirty years with disembodied ruminations of suicide, dead animals, and lethal walruses, a symptom of what Bowlby called "disordered mourning." Her image of the walrus's kiss of death reveals a truth she cannot see, a fear she cannot feel. It explains her rage with her beloved Isaiah, when she finds him running across the disintegrating ice in Copenhagen harbor. " … (jeg) slog … ham. Slaget var vel—som vold nu kan vaere det—et destillat af mine føleser for ham. Han holdt sig lige akkurat oprejst." (" … I hit him. The blow was probably a distillation of my feelings for him, the way violence sometimes is. He barely managed to stay on his feet"). A love more powerful even than her love for Isaiah was distilled in that single blow. For hove could Smilla tolerate even the thought of another loss to the sea?

Smilla does not disguise the centrality of her mother in her life. To the contrary, through memory and fantasy she has created an icon, an androgenous, Inuit god, earth mother and hunter, an almighty presence between whose legs she once lay, at whose breast she once nursed. The image is of a divinity in whose body the fluids of life, milk and blood, flow eternally.

Hun kysser mig aldrig, og hun rører sjaeldent ved mig. Men i øjeblikke af stor fortrolighed lader hun mig drikke den maelk, der bliver ved med at vaere der, bag huden, som blodet altid er der. Hun spreder sine ben, så jeg kan gå ind imellem dem. Sore de andre fangere går hun i bukser af bjørneskind, som kun garves nødtørftigt. Hun elsker asker, spiser den undertiden direkte ud af bålet, og hun har smurt sig under øjnene meed den. I denne duft af braendt kul og bjørneskind går jeg ind til brystet, der er lysende hvidt, med en stor, sart rosa areola. Der drikker jeg så immuk, min mors maelk.

She never kisses me, and she seldom touches me. But at moments of great intimacy, she lets me drink from the milk that is always there, beneath her skin, just as her blood is. She spreads her legs so I can come between them. Like the other hunters she wears pants made of bearskin, given only a rudimentary tanning. She loves ashes, sometimes eating them straight from the fire, and she has smeared some underneath her eyes. In this aroma of burned coal and bearskin, I go to her breast, which is brilliantly white, with a big, delicate rose aureole. There I drink immuk, my mother's milk.

But does the all-powerful maternal image conceal a treachery? Smilla's tale of intimate attachment to her mother is contained within a tale of destruction and death. As with the memory of her mother's disappearance, Smilla diverts attention from the actual love object in her mind's eye, not this time through smart, scientific facts, but through her mother's own anecdotal wisdom about the ebb and flow of life in the Arctic. Two years before Ane Qaavigaaq died, Smilla was hunting with her for narwhals and white-breasted auk. Among her mother's kill was a female narwhal and her angel-white pup, not yet born. Smilla herself caught three auk in a flock of black, white-breasted females on their way to their young with worms in a pouch in their beaks. She had them in her net, and she knew how to kill them by pressing on their hearts. She had done it before, but this time she balked.

Og så ser jeg nu alligevel pludselig deres øjne som tunneler, for enden af hvilke ungerne venter, og disse ungers øjne er igen tunneler, og for enden af dem er narhvalungen, hvis blik igen fører ind og bort. Lige så langsomt vender jeg ketcheren, og med en kort eksplosion af støj stiger fuglene til vejrs.

And yet I suddenly see their eyes as tunnels, at the end of which their young are waiting, and the babies' eyes are in turn tunnels, at the end of which is the narwhal pup, whose gaze in turn leads inward and away. Ever so slowly I turn over the net, and with a great explosion of sound, the birds rise into the air.

Seeing her daughter's distress, as if, Smilla recounts, she were seeing her for the first time, Ane, in essence, introduced Smilla to the notion of paradox. Sitting beside her, she said simply, " … jeg har båret dig i amaat … Alligevel … er jeg staerk som en mand" ("I have carried you in amaat … And yet, … I am as strong as a man"). And then she drew Smilla into her legs and to her breast, comforting her in her generous, fleshy, androgenous way. Later she spoke of the greater paradox of life and death, trying to explain, Smilla says, why one month 3,000 narwhals are gathered in the fjord and the next month they are dead, trapped in the ice. Smilla understood what her mother was trying to tell her, she recounts, "Men det aendrede intet" ("(T)hat didn't change a thing"). The year before her mother's death—Smilla would have been six—she began to feel nauseated when she went fishing.

Clearly, Smilla interprets the memory as her initiation into modern consciousness, the moment forever after which she would harbor "en fremmedhed over for naturen" ("a feeling of alienation toward nature") because it was no longer accessible to her "på den selvfølgelige måde den havde vaeret tidligere" ("in the natural way that it had been before"). "Måske er jeg allered dér begyndt at ønske at forstå isen. At ville forstå er at prøve at generobre noget vi har mistet" ("Perhaps I had even then begun to want to understand the ice. To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost"). But as Smilla has reconstructed the memory, its real heart is about maternal loss. As that small child Smilla saw herself in the baby birds, whose mothers would never return. She was the narwhal pup, robbed of its own mother, even as it too was robbed of its life. Smilla's image of the dark tunnel of depression, which she enters, stripped of illusion, as an adult, she already saw as a little girl in the eyes of the baby birds, at the tunnel's end an abandoned child.

Bowlby believed that disordered mourning revealed itself primarily in two variants of behavior, in the one extreme, chronic mourning, and in the other, Smilla's way, a prolonged absence of conscious grieving. "Adults who show prolonged absence of conscious grieving are commonly self-sufficient people, proud of their independence and self-control, scornful of sentiment; tears they regard as a weakness." Smilla is nothing if not in control. Even when she is not, she is looking like she is. She is a character endowed with encyclopedic knowledge, which she imparts with authority and seductive charm. As readers we must become as adept as she is at reading between the lines, decoding the messages, ferreting out the truth in the fissures that suddenly crack open. She is also a character defined by radical self-sufficiency. The very trait that makes her a contemporary, fictional wonder, the perfect heroine for the action-adventure film, is for Smilla as a character in a narrative of mourning, the mask that reveals the true face. Most critically effected, Bowlby maintained, is the mourner's "capacity to make and maintain love relationships (which becomes) more or less seriously impaired or, if already impaired, (is) left more impaired than it was before." By this measure Smilla makes a profound leap toward love when at the end she emotionally embraces the mechanic as part of her future and at the same as part of her return. He is, significantly, waiting "behind" her.

Høeg, in creating Smilla's past, has destined her for grieving. For she has been drubbed by the shattering, sudden, unresolved disappearances of all of her most beloved, her mother by drowning, her brother by suicide, compounded by Isaiah by murder. But Isaiah has left tracks, and for Smilla this seems to make all the difference as the mourning process is compulsively set in motion.

The Search

It would seem that Høeg has been compelled to create not only a character but also a narrative that is, at the very least, illuminated by a theory of mourning, possibly even driven by it. The child Isaiah, Greenlandic, gynandrous, mysteriously gone, is the perfect spark to ignite Smilla's memories both of her mother and of herself as a child, her memories of attachment and, in the same breath, loss, and thus to initiate the search, never completed, to find the mother never truly mourned. At the same time, the very structure of the narrative loosely resembles the four phases of mourning isolated by Bowlby: "numbing," "yearning and searching," "disorganization and despair," and "a greater or lesser degree of reorganization." Smilla seems to be in a phase of numbness as the novel begins, manifest in her rabid self-reliance, her fear of attachment (with, of course, the exception of Isaiah, who may have fooled her because he was "only" a child), and her embrace of the scientific guise, at the same time as she fears it, like the walrus's puckered kiss. The second phase, "yearning and searching," could be the subtitle for "The City," as Smilla begins a series of multi-layered, inter-connected, volatile investigations into the murder of the boy, the reluctant love affair with the mechanic, and the memories of the past.

Intermittent hope, repeated disappointment, weeping, anger, accusation, and ingratitude are all features of the second phase of mourning, and are to be understood as expressions of the strong urge to find and recover the lost person. Nevertheless, underlying these strong emotions, which erupt episodically and seem so perplexing, there is likely to coexist deep and pervasive sadness, a response to a recognition that reunion is at best improbable.

Once Smilla leaves land and sets out to sea, both she and the narrative begin to lose their bearings. Smilla's feeling for Absolute Space fails her. Isaiah seems almost forgotten. The mechanic disappears. The target of the investigation seems to shift from a murdered boy to a secret cargo. Bowlby's formulation of the third phase of mourning, "disorganization and despair," may shed critical light on this (often criticized) section of the novel, in which Smilla finds herself quite literally walking and crawling through every inch of the ship, including the dumb waiter, trying, at astounding physical risk, as it turns out, to open locked doors to discover what might be on the other side. "For mourning to have a favourable outcome," Bowlby observed:.

It appears to be necessary for a bereaved person to endure (a) buffeting of emotion. Only if he can tolerate the pining, the more or less conscious searching, the seemingly endless examination of how and why the loss occurred, and anger at anyone who might have been responsible … can he come gradually to recognize and accept that the loss is in truth permanent and that his life must be shaped anew.

He cited the English writer, C. S. Lewis, who wrote of his own, overwhelming grief in terms that, when applied to Høeg's narrative, capture the confusion of the section called "The Sea."

C. S. Lewis (1961) has described the frustrations not only of feeling but of thought and action that grieving entails. In a diary entry after the loss of his wife, H, he writes: "I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on, through habit, fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and I have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs-de-sac"

Smilla wears her bruised emotions on her body like contemporary body art. As Brad Leithauser described her in her near final phase:

… near the close of the book, we glimpse her with her clothes off as she steps into a shower: "There's no skin on my kneecaps. Between my hips there is a wide yellowish-blue patch that has coagulated under the skin where Jakkelsen's marlin spike struck me. The palms of both my hands have suppurating lesions that refuse to close. At the base of my skull I have a bruise like a gull's egg …"

This is a partial list of wounds. Still to come is the breaking of her nose. The mysterious struggle she is engaged in, against an amorphous circle of thugs and aristocrats, is savage. She might as well be battling one of the bears that she used to come upon in the far north … Actually, she might be better off with the polar bear. At least she would know who her enemy was and why it wanted her dead.

Leithauser drew no conclusion about the enemy. I speculate that it is the despair of loss, that her wounds and bruises are comic (action-adventure) representations of emotional lacerations she must endure in order to return, if you will, to the house of her mother to enter the final phase of mourning, "a greater or lesser degree of reorganization," as apt, if bland, a description as there could be of the conclusion of Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. Smilla herself, toward the end of "The Sea," tells us, as Høeg so often (and, at times, so pedantically) has her do, precisely what is going to happen. She has fled the ship and stumbled into the body of another dead boy, when she suddenly recognizes the mechanic as the fourth passenger.

Da jeg genkender ham forstår jeg, at jeg bliver nødt til at gå tilbage til Kronos.

Det er ikke fordi det pludselig er blevet lige meget om jeg lever eller dør. Det er snarere fordi problemet er blevet taget ud af haenderne på mig. Det er ikke noget med Esajas alene. Eller med mig selv. Eller med mekanikeren. Ikke engang alene noget med det der er mellem os. Det er noget større. Måske er det kaerligheden.

When I recognize him, I realize that I'll have to return to the Kronos.

"Not because it suddenly doesn't matter whether I live or die, but because the problem has been taken out of my hands. It no longer has to do with Isaiah alone. Or with me. Or with the mechanic. Or even with what there is between us. It's something much bigger. Maybe it's love.

Smilla returns to her passage through time, at the end, at the edge of the waters that took her mother, embracing for the future both the fetal image of Isaiah and the waiting mechanic, allowing her nemesis, Tørk Hviid, to flee onto the treacherous ice, off the page, and into oblivion.

In elaborating on the phase of "yearning and searching," Bowlby quoted Colin Murray Parks as saying:.

Although we tend to think of searching in terms of the motor act of restless movement towards possible locations of the lost object, (searching) also has perceptual and ideational components … Signs of the object can be identified only by reference to memories of the object as it was. Searching the external world for signs of the object therefore includes the establishment of an internal perceptual "set" derived from previous experiences of the object.

In terms of motor action, Høeg has Smilla quite literally get on board a ship that will carry her back to the place of her birth and her deepest loss, and he is not shy with his symbolism. The ship is named Kronos, the classical god of time, associated with change, with melancholy, and with death. In his fine introduction to Melancholy Dialectics (1993), his book on the play of mourning in the works of Walter Benjamin, Max Pensky traced the transition of what he calls "the role of melancholia in Western culture" from medical to theological and ethical discourses. The eventual kinship to Kronos is striking.

The original medical texts of late antiquity … become associated with astrological bodies and properties. Melancholia becomes connected with Saturn, the cold, dark, and slow planet, and thence the correspondence, Saturn-melancholia, with Chronos, the classical god of time, who is now transfigured into the god of sadness and morbidity, of delay … thus the association of melancholy with Saturn, and Saturn with the god Chronos, Chronos with time and universal death … "

But Høeg seems to love nothing more than the dialectical, and thus, at the same time as Smilla sails in a ship marked by time, birth imagery abounds: an enclosed vessel, a blind passage through maternal waters, the waiting fetal image. None of this is subtle.

More nuanced, however, is what Bowlby/Parks called the "perceptual and ideational components," or, the external "signs" of the internalized object "as it was." Isaiah is, of course, the most conspicuous sign, but then there is the mechanic. Is Føjl to be read as the English "foil" or the Danish "feel"? Both have connotations. For is he not the perfect, maternal surrogate? (He even shares his own creator's Christian name.) Like Smilla's mother, he is large of body and androgynous of spirit, strong and protective. Like her, too, he is primarily non-verbal, a stutterer, who, nevertheless, is the only one who can cajole Smilla out of her depression. He gives her nourishment, like mother's milk in adult guise, tropical tea and thick espresso, and he takes her between his legs. Time and again, as if she cannot help herself, Smilla connects the mechanic to her childhood. He cooks for her, and she is "mindet om måltidets rituelle betydning. At jeg husker barndommens forening af samvaerets højtidelighed og de store smagsoplevelser … Fornemmelsen af, at stort set all i livet er til for at blive delt" ("reminded of the ritual significance of meals. In my childhood I remember associating the solemnity of companionship with great gustatory experiences … The feeling that practically everything in life is meant to be shared"). He sleeps with her and she is reminded of a parental kiss. "Munden og naesen vibrerer blødt, som om han dufter til en blomst. Eller skal til at kysse et barn" ("His mouth and nose vibrate gently, as if he were sniffing at a flower. Or were about to kiss a child"). But the mechanic, like Smilla's mother, is also potentially treacherous, a man of secrets who is not necessarily what he seems to be. Most dangerously, he is a man who can mysteriously disappear, as he does, just as Smilla is about to set sail for Greenland. As a "sign" he must be nearly irresistible to her. At the same time he seems to signal a change in her fortune in the narrative of mourning. For when, in the penultimate section, he returns to the Kronos as the fourth passenger, he in effect reverses the series of (three) shattering, mysterious disappearances Smilla has suffered by mysteriously reappearing, significantly in a shower of warm water.

But the most seductive "sign" of all for Smilla is her beloved snow. Smilla authoritatively announces early on, "Jeg synes bedre om sne og is end om kaerligheden" ("I think more highly of snow and ice than love"). Equally authoritatively Høeg cautioned readers not to trust her. "She should not be relied on, because she's hidding her sensitivity and feelings under a rough surface" (Lyall). Both statements are misleading, for it is not so much a matter of snow versus love, but of snow as Smilla's disguised obsession with the loss of love. Smilla herself makes the connection, if she disguises the nature of the loss, when, at the end of her reminiscence about her mother's intimate embrace, she muses, "Måske er jeg allerede dér begyndt at ønske at forstå isen. At ville forstå er at prøve at generobre noget vi har mistet" ("Perhaps I had even then begun to want to understand the ice. To want to understand is an attempt to recapture something we have lost").

Smilla is, she says, "panisk" ("panic-stricken") at the prospect of loving the mechanic, for fear it won't last.

Dér på hans gulv, ved siden af hans seng, kan jeg høre noget. Det kommer inde fra mig selv, og det er en klynken. Det er frygten for, at det der er givet mig, ikke skal vare ved. Det er lyden af alle de ulykkelige kaerlighedshistorier jeg aldrig har villet lytte til. Nu lyder det, som om jeg selv rummer dem alle.

Standing there on his floor, next to his bed, I can hear something. It's coming from inside me, and it's a whimper. It's the fear that what has been given to me won't last. It's the sound of all the unhappy love stories I've never wanted to listen to. Now it sounds as if they're all contained within me.

In her study on melancholy, Soleil Noris: Depression et melancholie (1987) (Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989)), Julia Kristeva wrote early on:

Le désenchantement, fût-il cruel, que je subis ici et maintenant semble entrer en résonance, à l'examen, avec des traumas anciens dont je m'aperçois que je n'ai jamais su faire le deuil. Je peux trouver ainsi des antécédents de mon effondrement actuel dans une perte, une mort ou un deuil, de quelqu'un on de quelque chose, que j'ai jadis aimés. La disparition de cet être indispensable continue de me priver de la part la plus valable de moi-même: je la vis comme une blessure ou une privation, pour découvrir, toutefois, que ma peine n'est que l'ajournement de la haine ou du désir d'emprise que je nourris pour celui ou pour celle qui m'ont trahie ou abandonnée. Ma dépression me signale que je ne sais pas perdre; peut-être ai-je pas su trouver un contrepartie valable à la perte. Il s'ensuit que toute perte entraine la perte de mon être—et de l'Être lui-même.

The disenchantment that I experience here and now, cruel as it may be, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which I realize I have never been able to resign myself. I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved. The disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; I live it as a wound or deprivation, discovering just the same that my grief is but the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I nurture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned me. My depression points to my not knowing how to lose—I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being—and of Being itself.

Smilla, afraid to lose, has practiced, she says, the art of renouncing, "det eneste i denne verden der er vaerd at laere" ("the only thing in the world that is worth learning"). Her passion, her yearning for love and for beauty, she has channeled into the study of snow and ice, for in her mind they are the substance of permanence. Ice is the opponent of the sea. "(D)en daekker vandet og gør det fast, sikkert, farbart, overskueligt" ("(I)t covers the water and makes it solid, safe, negotiable, manageable"). The sea robs Smilla, as we know, of her sense of Absolute Space. She experiences the loss as actual physical disintegration.

Langsomt vil denne forvirring arbejde sig ind i mit balancesystems vaeskekar og opløse min stedsans, den vil kaempe sig ud i mine celler og forskyde deres saltkoncentration og dermed nervesystemets ledningsevne, og efterlade mig døv, blind og hjaelpeløs … Fra jeg for nogle timer siden er gâet ombord, er nedbrydningen sat ind. Det koger allerede i mine ører, i mine slimhinder sker der underlige, umotiverede vaeskeskred.

… this confusion will work its way into the chambers of my inner ear and destroy my sense of orientation; it will fight its way into my cells and displace their salt concentrations and the conductivity of my nervous system as well, leaving me deaf, blind, and helpless … The process of disintegration started the moment I came on board several hours ago. There's a boiling in my ears, a strange, internal displacement of fluids.

This is the experience of dissolving, of dying, and it is brought on by the very sea that took her mother.

For Smilla snow is the substance that preserves form, like Isaiah's tracks. It is the substance of connection, associated in her mind with winter, her mother's favorite season, and the visiting of others. "Vinteren var en tid til samvaer, ikke til jordens undergang" ("Winter was a time for community, not for the end of the world"). Snow is the substance of certainty. It is the substance of perfection. Like all who mourn, Smilla longs for something that can contain the essence of what is lost, Keats's Grecian urn, Dinesen's blue vase. Smilla has found it in her ability to imagine snow. "I den ydre verden vil der aldrig eksistere en fuldendt dannet snekrystal. Men i vores bevidsthed ligger den glitrende og lydefri viden om den perfekte is" ("In the external world a perfectly formed snow crystal would never exist. But in our consciousness lies the glittering and flawless knowledge of perfect ice"). Smilla seems to find in the ice all that she longs for, life, wildness, beauty, change, and eternal permanence. Nearing Greenland, she describes in the most sensuous terms the creation of the ice cover:

Det er skabt i skønhed. En oktoberdag er temperaturen faldet 30 grader celcius på fire timer, og havet er blevet stille som et spejl. Det venter på at gengive et skabelsesunder. Skyerne og havet glider nu samme i et forhaeng af grå, fed silke. Vandet bliver tyktflydende og ganske let rødligt, som en likør på vilde baer. En blå tåge af frostrøg gøar sig fri af vandoverfladen, og driver hen over vandspejlet. Så størkner vandet. Op af det mørke hav traekker kulden nu en rosenhave, et hvidt taeppe af lsblomster, dannet af salte og frosne vanddråber. De vil måske leve fire timer, måske to dage.

It was created in beauty. One October day the temperature drops 50 degrees in four hours, and the sea is as motionless as a mirror. It's waiting to reflect a wonder of creation. The clouds and the sea glide together in a curtain of heavy gray silk. The water grows viscous and tinged with pink, like a liqueur of wild berries. A blue fog of frost smoke detaches itself from the surface of the water and drifts across the mirror. Then the water solidifies. Up out of the dark sea the cold now pulls a rose garden, a white blanket of ice blossoms formed from the salt and frozen drops of water. That may last for four hours or two days.

The ice is endlessly transformed, even as it remains, always, what it is: hexagonal crystals dissolve into new hexagons, to become frazil ice and grease ice and pancake ice and then hiku (permanent ice) and ice floes, blue and black floes, and white glacier ice, ad infinitum.

But, of course, snow is as impermanent as life, the quintessence of impermanence. Touched by the human hand it disappears, as suddenly and completely as Smilla's mother. Only in Smilla's mind is it a constant. Even in its physical construction it is made up of wholes and holes, as illusive a substance as Smilla could have found for her passion, and thus, in essence, the perfect "sign" for her mother, both in her presence and her absence. It is the substance in which she is both to be lost and to be found. Yet, as long as Smilla continues to romanticize snow, she can avoid facing the loss that it hides. She need never lose again.

Kristeva, in her work on mourning, has said that it is the escalating number of signs that is the mourner's true "sign." In summarizing Kristeva's contribution to the literature of mourning, Max Pensky wrote:

It is this very proliferation of signs that draws the melancholic's attention, both as the exact schematic representation of the sites of the melancholic's loss and as the only possible medium in which the Thing could be glimpsed. The chaotic mass of symbolic signification—of names—"means" the loss of meaning. It therefore signifies in a double motion. For the melancholic who is able to recover from the paralytic, illogic thrall of loss—who can sublimate it—meaning translates into the continually frustrated fascination with the rifts and discontinuties that remain in the proliferation of signs.

In this light Isaiah's murder is, indeed, the moment that sets Smilla free. For it gives her justification to begin the search, to open up her frozen focus to look for signs of her lost beloved quite literally everywhere, and, as the detective, to explore to the point of obsession, "the rifts and discontinuities" in the case of "the murdered child." At the end Smilla stands on the ice, surrounded by the signs of Isaiah, the mechanic, and the snow, in the landscape of her mother's death, with the possibility of the child—the Smilla/Isaiah—being reborn. And in a Kristevan sense, meaning is reasserted as Smilla poeticizes the ever-expanding rift in the landscape as the white frost of fog hovers overhead and Tørk, driven by her into the distance, disappears on the bluish white ice, destined to be sucked under by the waters running darkly underneath. Smilla has taken her mother up into herself. Like her, she has become the hunter, in the name of the children avenging the deaths of all of those who have been sacrificed.

The Black Stone

To return to the questions provoked by the old folk tale riddle that underlies Høeg's text—is there a heart and does Høeg break it or not?—my answer is only too obvious. In my reading, Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne is a sentimental narrative about the mourning of the child, a narrative told with a broken heart that the writer attempts to heal. "Min mors forfaedre ville have undret sig over, at universets nøgler for en af deres efterkommere skulle vise sig at vaere skriftlig" ("My mother's forefathers would have been astounded that the key to the universe for one of their descendants would turn out to be in written form"), Smilla/Høeg says. S/he does not seem, to borrow Leithauser's word, to be being "coy." Yet the narrative fact remains that that meteorite, with its deadly worms, lies waiting at the end, just as surely as the mechanic. Smilla, as usual, tells us so herself. "Bag os er stadig stenen, dens gåde, de spørgsmål den har rejst/Og mekanikeren." ("Behind us the stone is still there, with its mystery and the questions it has raised. And the mechanic"). What questions has it raised? we might ask. One certainly is, is this whole tale a showstopping, post-modern pastiche? Another critic, with another bent, could use that worm-filled stone to turn my reading back upon itself. In the short time the stone is present in the text, its meanings shift like sand, particularly as Tørk deconstructs it for Smilla on their walk toward it. It is Inuit myth, science-fiction vision, scientific discovery-of-the-century, ancient source of life, capitalist commodity, waiting plague, narrative signifier, narrative joke, depending on who exploits it. Smilla takes her own turns with it. On first hearing about it from the mechanic, she remarks, "Je håber inderligt, det er et nummer" ("I sincerely hope that it's a hoax"), and later on with Tørk:

Pludselig er det heller ikke for mig vigtig om den lever. Pludselig er den et symbol. Omkring den udkrystalliseres i dette øjeblik den vestlige naturvidenskabs holdning til verden omkring den. Beregnetheden, hadet, håbet, frygten, forsøget på at instrumentalisere. Og over alt andet, staerkere end nogen følelse for noget levende: pengebegaeret.

(Suddenly whether the stone is alive or not is no longer important to me, either. Suddenly it has become a symbol. At this moment it becomes the crystallization of the attitude of Western science toward the world. Calculation, hatred, hope, fear, the attempt to measure everything. And above all else, stronger than any empathy for living things: the desire for money.)

In conclusion I would offer my own interpretation of the black stone as yet another "sign" in the narrative of mourning, bearing, of course, in mind the villain's words, "Det er ikke vigtig, hvordan tingene virkelig forholder sig. Det vigtige er, hvad mennesker tror" ("The true reality of things is not important. What's important is what people believe").

"The Giant Who Had No Heart In Him" is only one of many texts, literary and non-, that seem to play in the narrative shadows of Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne. They are as numerous as readrs who have read them, text by Andersen, Benjamin, Conrad, Dinesen, Foucoult, Girard, etc. Yet one that leaps to mind more spontaneously than others is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the ultimate nineteenth-century critique of a society that gives privilege to the world of science to the exclusion of the world of feeling. At its heart too lies a murdered child, the young boy, William, Dr. Frankenstein's youngest brother, who is the Creature's first victim. The Creature is more literally the young scientist's creation, but Tørk is equally Smilla's double, an arid, white shadow who stalks her, a disembodied voice who talks to her from the other end of the phone, her pursuer as equally as she is his. Their bond is mutually acknowledged.

(Smilla:) Det er tanken om, at han fra begyndelsen har vidst hvem jeg er, der er ulidelig. Jeg husker ikke, siden jeg var barn, i så høj grad at have følt mig i et andet menneskes vold.

It's the realization that he knew who I was from the very beginning that is so excruciating. Not since my childhood have I felt so strongly in someone else's power.

(Tørk:) Du bluffer vidunderligt, siger han.—Jeg ville langt hellere sidde oppe i tønden og høre på at du lyver, end gå rundt blandt alle disse middelmådige sandheder.

You're a spectacular bluffer … I'd much rather sit up in the crow's nest listening to your lies than walk around among all these mediocre truths.

(Smilla:) Vi er forbundet red en navlestreng, som mor og barn.

We're connected by an umbilical cord, like mother and child.

Tørk is the frigid mind, the deadened child who, like the deeply wounded Creature, will kill until he is overcome and driven out.

The finale Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne, Smilla's pursuit of Tørk across the ice and into the distance, has its antecedent in the narrative frame of Frankenstein. The crew of the earlier, fictional ship, temporarily locked in the glacial waters of the Arctic, first spots the Creature fleeing toward the North Pole. As told by the young scholar/explorer:

… a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention, and diverted our solicitude from our own situations. We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge, and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveler with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant equalities of the ice.

In the morning they discover his pursuer, the "melancholy and despairing" Dr. Frankenstein in parallel chase.

It was, in fact, a sledge, like that we had seen before, which had drifted towards us in the night on a large fragment of ice. Only one dog remained alive; but there was a human being within it, whom the sailors were persuading to enter the vessel. He was not as the other traveler seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an European.

The novel ends with the horrified, young explorer bearing witness to the Creature's agonized leave-taking of his creator and tormentor, the dead Dr. Frankenstein, and his painful exit from the narrative:

"But soon," he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, "I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell."

He sprung from the cabin window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.

Høeg, reversing the "European" (here Tørk) and "the savage inhabitant" (here Smilla), collapses the chase into the final scene.

Han ser mig, eller måske set han bare at der står en skikkelse, så søager han ud på isen. Jeg følger ham i en retning der er parallel med hans. Han ser, hvem jeg er. Han maerker at han ikke har overskud til at nå mig … Han søger for langt mod højre. Da han instinktivt retter op, ligger skibet 200 meter bag os. Han har mistet orienteringen. Han føres ud mod det øbne vand. Mod dér, hvor strømmen har udhulet isen, så den bliver tynd som en hinde, en fosterhinde … Måske vil isen om et øjeblik give efter under ham. Han vil måske føle det som en lettelse, at det kolde vand gør ham vaegtløs og suger ham ned … Eller han skifter i stedet retning og søger igen mod højre, ud over isen. Inat vil temperaturen falde yderligere, og der vil komme snestorm. Han vil kun leve et par timer. På et tidspunkt vil han standse op, og kulden vil forvandle ham, som en istap, en frossen skal lukket om et akkurat flydende liv, indtil også pulsen stilner, og han bliver ét med landskabet … Et sted foran mig bliver den løbende skikkelse langsomt mørkere.

Then he sees me, or maybe he merely sees a figure, and he heads out onto the ice. I take a path parallel to his. He sees that it's me. He realizes that he doesn't have the strength to reach me … He parallel to his. He sees that it's me. He realizes that he doesn't have the strength to reach me … He heads too far to the right. When he instinctively corrects his course, the ship is two hundred yards behind us. He's lost his bearings. He's being led out toward open water. Toward the spot where the current has hollowed out the ice so it's as thin as a membrane … Maybe in a moment the ice will give way beneath him. Maybe it will seem a relief to have the cold water make him weightless and suck him downward … Or maybe he will change direction and head to the right again, across the ice. He'll only survive a couple of hours. At some point he will stop, and the cold will transform him; like a stalactite, a frozen shell will close around a barely fluid life until even this pulse stops and he becomes one with the landscape … Somewhere ahead of me the running figure slowly grows darker.

The death metaphor has been changed from fire to ice, but that Høeg's ending is a deliberate narrative doubling of Shelly's—with a significant twist—calls attention to itself.

Both Frankenstein and Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne are novels of paradises lost, but, metaphorically speaking, Dr. Frankenstein and the Creature flee into a pristine, arctic landscape, only to corrupt it with their footsteps and their corpses. Smilla and Tørk arrive at, one might say, the same place, but it is long since a fallen world, both inner- and extratextually. Tørk and his men have been here before. Isaiah has witnessed his father's destruction here at the hands of the powers of greed. But, too, the Doctor and his Creature fled here, already in 1818. And what they brought with them, and what lies buried with them, is despair. Creator and experiment, they are the precursors of the dark side of the modern, scientific age, where feeling has been sacrificed on the altar of disembodied data. They share the guilt for the symbolic dead child, vying even for the measure of their grief. The Creature parts from the dead Frankenstein with the words, "Blasted as thou were, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them forever." But Frankenstein's earlier words still hang in the air:

But I, the true murderer, felt the never-dying worm alive in my bosom, which allowed of no hope or consolation … Anguish and despair had penetrated into the core of my head; I bore a hell within me which nothing could extinguish.

If only by literary association, might not the mysterious, black stone be the solidification of the Creature's ashes, and might not the worms in the stone be the descendents of "the never-dying worm" in Frankenstein's blasted heart? But in her own narrative Smilla, the hunter/child, is still alive to challenge them. Høeg seems to have been determined to go back, "For at gøre noget om. For at prøve, om der skulle findes en anden mulighed" ("To do something differently. To see whether there might be an alternative"), if only by sheer authorial will.

Source: Mary Kay Norseng, "A House of Mourning: Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne," in Scandanavian Studies, Vol. 69, Winter 1997, pp. 52–83.

Sources

Bell, Pearl, "Fiction Chronicle," in Partisan Review, Vol. LXI, No. 1, Winter 1994, pp. 80–95.

Eder, Richard, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 26, 1993, pp. 3, 11.

Hazleton, Lesley, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in the Seattle Times, October 3, 1993, p. F2.

Henry, William, III, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in People Weekly, Vol. 40, No. 14, 1993, p. 32–34.

Kennedy, Thomas E., and Frank Hugus, Introduction, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 7–10.

Leithauser, Brad, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in New Republic, Vol. 209, No. 18, November 1, 1992, p. 39.

Loose, Julian, Review of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, in London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 9, May 12, 1994, p. 27.

McCue, John, Review of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4720, September 17, 1993, p. 20.

Meyer, Michael, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in New York Review of Books, Vol. XL, No. 19, November 18, 1993, p. 41.

Møller, Hans Henrik, "Peter Høeg or The Sense of Writing," in Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 69, Winter 1997, pp. 29–51.

Nathan, Robert, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in New York Times Book Review, September 26, 1993, p. 12.

Norseng, Mary Kay, "A House of Mourning: Frøken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne," in Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 69, No. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 52–83.

Satterlee, Thomas, "Peter Høeg," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 214: Twentieth-Century Danish Writers, edited by Marianne Stecher-Hansen, The Gale Group, 1999, pp. 178–87.

Schaffer, Rachel, "Smilla's Sense of Gender Identity," in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring– Summer 1998, pp. 47–60.

Shapiro, Laura, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in Newsweek, Vol. 122, No. 10, September 6, 1993, p. 54.

Simonds, Merilyn, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in the Montreal Gazette, December 11, 1993, p. 12.

Smiley, Jane, Review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, in Washington Post Book World, October 24, 1993, pp. 1, 11.

Whiteside, Shaun, Review of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, in Manchester Guardian Weekly, Vol. 149, No. 19, November 7, 1993, p. 29.

Williams, John, Review of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 6, No. 268, September 3, 1993, p. 41.

Further Reading

Caufield, Richard A., "The Kalaallit of West Greenland," in Endangered Peoples of the Arctic: Struggles to Survive and Thrive, edited by Milton Freeman, Greenwood Press, 2000.

Caulfield presents a readable history of the Inuit peoples of Greenland, from historical past into the twenty-first century.

Nuttal, Mark, "Greenland: Emergence of an Inuit Homeland," in Polar Peoples: Self-Determination & Development, edited by Minority Rights Group, Minority Rights Publications, 1994.

Nuttall's chapter in this longer overview of polar peoples offers the reader a concise history of Danish colonization of Greenland as well as prospects for the future.

Satterlee, Thomas, "Peter Høeg," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 214: Twentieth-Century Danish Writers, edited by Marianne Stecher-Hansen, The Gale Group, 1999, pp. 178–187.

Satterlee provides an excellent introduction to Peter Høeg's work for the student who wants to know more about the writer.

Schaffer, Rachel, "Smilla's Sense of Gender Identity," in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 19, No. 1, Spring– Summer 1998, pp. 47–60.

In a readable critical article, Schaffer applies feminist theory to the novel.