Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
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Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow or Smilla's Sense of Snow (original Danish title: Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne) is a 1992 novel by Danish author Peter Høeg. It was translated into English by Tiina Nunnally under the first title for the U.S. market. Another translation, under the second title – ostensibly done by "F. David" – was published in the United Kingdom; it is, however, at heart the same translation as the U.S. version, with various modifications made by the author and his publisher with which the translator did not agree and as a result of which she requested that her name be removed from it. [1]
[edit] Plot summary
The novel is ostensibly a work of detection and a thriller, although beneath the surface of the novel, Høeg is concerned with rather deeper cultural issues, particularly Denmark's curious post-colonial history, and also the nature of relationships that exist between individuals and the societies in which they are obliged to operate. The protagonist Smilla Jaspersen is a sympathetic and useful vehicle in this respect, her deceased mother being Greenlandic Inuit and her father a rich Dane.
Miss Smilla's relationship with Denmark and Danish society, having been brought in childhood from the poverty and freedom of Greenland to the affluent and highly ordered Denmark society, is, to say the least of it, strained and ambivalent. Smilla investigates the death of a neighbor’s child she befriended, a Greenlander with an alcoholic, neglectful mother – a fellow outsider. The story begins in Copenhagen, where the child has plunged to his death from their snowy apartment rooftop. The police refuse to consider it anything but an accident, but Smilla, who learned from her Inuit family how to read the subtle clues in different types of snow (hence the title of the book), believes the footprints indicate that the boy was chased off the roof. Her investigations lead her to decades-old conspiracies in Copenhagen, and then voyaging on an icebreaker ship to a remote part of Greenland where the truth is finally discovered.
[edit] Film adaptation
The book was also produced as a 1997 motion picture called Smilla's Sense of Snow, starring Julia Ormond, Jim Broadbent, Gabriel Byrne, Richard Harris, Jürgen Vogel, Mario Adorf and Tom Wilkinson, directed by Bille August.
[edit] External links
- Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (UK translation - ISBN 1-86046-167-0)
- Smilla's Sense of Snow (US translation - ISBN 0-385-31514-7)
- Bohème Magazine Article about Smilla's Sense of Snow
- Smilla's Sense of Snow at the Internet Movie Database
- A Tale of Two Smillas (pdf) Kirsten Malmkjær, Centre for Research in Translation, Middlesex University
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