Miss Smilla's flair for snow

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Fräulein Smillas Feel for Snow (Danish: Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne ) is a novel by Peter Høeg from 1992.

action

Five-year-old Inuk boy Isaiah falls to his death from the roof of an apartment block in Copenhagen. The police suspect he was playing on the roof, but Smilla Jaspersen, who grew up in Greenland and lives in the same house, reads from the tracks in the snow on the roof that it was not an accident - Isaiah ran to the edge in panic and because of his fear of heights, he must have had a solid reason to even climb onto the roof.

Smilla, the daughter of an Inuk and a Danish doctor, lives as an unemployed scientist in Copenhagen and is not at peace with herself. She is harsh and dismissive towards other people, but has recently made friends with Isaiah, who lived in precarious circumstances with his alcoholic single mother in the neighboring apartment and saw a surrogate mother in Smilla.

Driven by her friendship with Isaiah and her anger over his apparently provoked death, she set out to investigate the matter herself after her objections to the police and prosecutor were unsuccessful. Reluctantly, she finds support in the “mechanic” Peter Føjl, another neighbor who was also friends with Isaiah, but whose trustworthiness changes several times - on the one hand he supports Smilla and saves her from danger, on the other hand he himself seems to be part of the riddle. Strange findings on Isaiah's corpse finally bring Smilla on past polar expeditions on behalf of the Cryolite Society Denmark . Isaiah's father was killed on one of these expeditions. She follows this trail, initially only being intimidated and then threatened by opponents unknown to her. Finally, several attacks are carried out on her, of which she barely survives a ship explosion.

Through connections, she finds out that another polar expedition is being prepared and, through a trick, gets on board as a stewardess. Since the entire crew is loyal or obliged to the initially hidden expedition leader Tørk, they must regard everyone there as their mortal enemy, act cautiously and skillfully gain small advantages. Here, too, she barely escapes a few deadly traps, but gradually discovers the secret: The cryolite society has discovered a huge meteorite with puzzling properties in the ice, which gives off heat from a source that is as yet unknown and therefore lies in a meltwater lake. In its surroundings, the polar worm , an animal parasite, which is actually harmless to humans , mutated into a deadly killer, which cost the lives of busy divers, including Isaiah's father. Their deaths were covered up as accidents.

The solution is presented to Smilla in a big showdown by Tørk, who also sees her as a scientist as a colleague, although he knows that he will have to eliminate her afterwards. Tørk wants to rescue the meteorite from the ice, bring it to Europe and hopes for fame and fortune from it. It was also he who chased Isaiah onto the roof to extract a tape cassette that his father had given him and that would have betrayed the goal of the expedition. After this revelation he wants to have Smilla killed in the meteorite cave. When that fails, he runs back to the ship, followed by Smilla, but gets lost and ends up on the frozen sea. The novel ends with Smilla's certainty that he will not survive.

shape

The novel is told from Smilla's perspective in the first person and is divided into three parts with the titles "The City", "The Sea" and "The Ice". They are each about the events in Copenhagen, the trip to Greenland and the events at the destination.

Numerous memories and inner monologues are woven into the main storyline, in which Smilla shows how much the Inuit culture differs from the European one, what the time as a Danish colony meant for her, how deeply rooted she is in the Inuit culture and how much, on the other hand, she has become estranged from her.

criticism

The book was highly praised by international critics and became a bestseller. The literary quartet, however, unanimously found the book to be a rather weak detective novel in March 1994 .

The book was filmed in 1997 by Bille August with Julia Ormond , Gabriel Byrne , Tom Wilkinson , Jim Broadbent , Richard Harris , Mario Adorf and Jürgen Vogel as Miss Smilla's feeling for snow , although some critics missed the psychological depth of the original.

German-language editions

Translated from Danish by Monika Wesemann .