Windows To The World

SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW

 Peter Høeg 

In Copenhagen one day during a cold December Smilla Jaspersen was on her way home. She comes upon the scene of the death of her young neighbor and friend six year old Isaiah. Like herself, this young boy is of mixed heritage, a combination of Dane and Greenlander. Isaiah’s mother is an alcoholic who leaves Isaiah to fend for himself most of the time so he has struck up some friendships in his apartment building and had become close to Smilla.

 Apparently he was on the roof of a nearby warehouse and fell to his death. Smilla is aware that the boy is afraid of heights and she inspects the roof, which has no footprints other than Isaiah’s, which at one point lead from the center right over edge. Smilla who can read snow knows that Isaiah was frightened and ran off of the roof.  She asks for a investigation and sets in motion a set of events that will take her to the edge of the world and to her own near extinction.

She begins to get some intimations of the complexities involved when she finds out that a deep muscle biopsy was done on Isaiah’s thigh and when she begins to learn more about Isaiah who was being tracked by high powered lawyers and others. This seems to be related to the death of the boy’s father several years before on a Greenland exploration.

Smilla grew up in Greenland living the nomadic outdoor life of her mother, a great hunter. Much of her personality developed in these free circumstances, which had their own set of survival rules. One of which was no whining. It would drive the prey away. Her father was a noted famous and wealthy anesthesiologist. Smilla lost her mother to the sea when she was young and she began to feel alienation toward nature. She began then to want to understand the ice in an attempt to recapture what she had lost. She subsequently learned all there was to know about snow and ice.

Her father brought her to Denmark to be educated and she kept running back to Greenland until she realized her father was all she had, but they were never very close no matter how hard he tried. Along with Smilla’s ability to understand ice and snow she had an extraordinary sense of orientation. She could locate her self and her party anywhere along the coast of Greenland and was taken along even as a child often as a safeguard to getting lost.

Smilla lost her mother to the sea when she was young and she began to feel an alienation toward nature. She began then to want to understand the ice in an attempt to recapture what she had lost.

The author did a good job in trying to educate the reader as well. There is so much more to ice than I ever imagined. Particularly the ice and it's interface with the sea. When the temperature starts to drop the surfaces of the sea reaches 29ºF and the first ice crystals form. This is a temporary membrane that the winds and waves break up into frazel ice. This is kneaded together into a mash called grease ice, and gradually forms free floating plates, pancake ice, which on a cold day freezes into one solid sheet. When the grease ice disintegrates it is called “rotten ‘ ice.

At first the snow is a six-sided newly formed flake. After 48 hours, the flakes break down and their outlines blur. By the tenth day, the snow is a grainy crystal that becomes compacted after two months. After two years it enters a transitional phase between snow and firn. After three years it becomes névé. After four years it is transformed into large blocky glacial crystal. There are names for all the different kinds of snow from powder snow, to big snow qanik.

When Smilla tries to explain about what she sees on the roof with those seemingly self-explanatory footprints the authorities as well as her father look at her skeptically. Her father put it into words: Reading the snow is like listening to music, to describe what you have read is like explaining music in writing. But Smilla is one thing most of all. She is tenacious and she pursues every clue until it leads her from the thirties, to the sixties to the present day.  There are several threads that pass through all these eras and the most common of these is greed. This is what colonization is about usually.

Smilla is constantly amazed at how poorly Danes and Greenlanders understand each other. Of course in her opinion it is worse for the Greenlanders because it is not a good thing for the tightrope walker to be misunderstood by the person holding the tightrope. In the sixties though it was politically correct to call Greenland Denmark’s most Northern county with all the same rights as the other Danes, providing of course they spoke Danish and got educated in Denmark. All the money in Greenland is attached to Danish language and culture. Those who master these prerequisites get the good jobs, the rest can filet fish in the factories.

Nonetheless no matter what one may detest about the colonization of Greenland it did improve the material needs of an existence that was one of the most difficult in the world. The Inuit very rarely died of hunger any more. That they murdered each other an exceedingly high rate these days was not factored in.

Smilla understands better now that she is older that freedom of choice is an illusion, that life leads us through a series of bitter, involuntary repetitive confrontations with problems that we haven’t resolved. The mystery is why was the death of one small boy so important to important people who tentacles reach back into Greenland’s exploration of the past 60 years.

She is facing death every day in order to figure this out. When she does she has to think about what her role will then be.

Peter Høeg says

“We all live our lives blindly believing in the people who make the decisions. Believing in Science. We accept the existence of a round globe, of an atom’s nucleus that sticks together like drops, of a shrinking universe, - and the necessity of interfering with genetic material. Not because we think these things are true, but because we believe the people who tell us so."

Smilla hardly ever believed anybody and she felt that was important. She considers her main strength to be the ability to distance herself from emotions and belief in people. Actually her strength was that people could really believe in her.

This is a beautiful book, one in which you might underline significant and moving passages, keep more than one copy in case you lose one, and read over and again.