Books: Smilla's Sense Of Snow By Peter Høeg Redux

 (Drivebycuriosity) - There are some books which stay in the memory and need be reread sometimes. "Smilla`s Sense of Snow" by the Danish author Peter Høeg, published in 1992, belongs to them (amazon). I have read the strange novel in the 1990s. The novel became somewhat famous, partly because of an amusing but anatomical impossible explicit sex scene. The novel stretches over almost 500 pages and touches a lot of topics including parasitic pandemics, which put "Smilla" back on my mind.

The plot circles around Smilla, a woman in her thirties, who lives in Denmark. She grew up on Greenland as the daughter of a female Inuit hunter and a rich urban Danish physician, who apparently finances her standard of living. Smilla, who is an expert in arctic conditions, but is apparently unoccupied, gets obsessed with the death of a little boy - a neighbour’s child whom she had befriended. She begins an intense investigation which leads to a chain of surprising events (this is a spoiler free blog. You can read a synopsis here wikipedia )

"Smilla" is a surreal fable, a kind of a weird dream. The book reads like a mixture of Kafka´s novel and Michael Crichton`s books. After almost 30 years I was less impressed.  Høeg mixed too many ingredients into the dough: Denmark´s colonization of Greenland, arctic explorations, the art of accounting, rogue companies, conspiracies, dysfunctional families, science fiction, tropical parasites and much more, which made the plot too hard digest. And the characters are unbelievable, especially Smilla, who behaves like a spoiled kid and a mixture of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.

But there are also parts of the book I did enjoy.  Høeg masterfully describes snow, ice, Nordic weather, the arctic sea and I indulged into a boat ride through the ice. The author also stuffed his tale with myriads of interesting facts and a lot of science. "A good parasite does not kill its host". "Smilla" is an entertaining book, but reading it twice is enough, goodbye Smilla.