Smilla's Sense of Snow
by Peter Hoeg

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Book Reviews of Smilla's Sense of Snow

Book Review: A Classic for All Time Makes a Modest Debut
Summary: 5 Stars

Why do I think so? Because the book tells a story that is myth/fairytale/saga, with characters and situations that may not be logical and may be a little beyond real, but that make complete sense and have a ring of the profoundest truth--like a dream. Surreal. That's a popular word today. Look at a surrealist painting by Dali or the paintings of Frieda Kahlo--they reach in and touch at the deepest part of the subconscious, where the archetypes sleep.

SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is like the myths and fairytales that have survived the Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution and the Computer Age. The book is exactly like the ancient legends and fairy tales that live on and on, because they talk about things that are very deep and elemental.

SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is just like MOBY DICK--but I could never relate to MOBY DICK, and I can relate to this book in the way that MOBY DICK must have taken hold of many people. The book stirs my unconscious without my conscious mind even having to participate, in the way that a Grimm's fairy tale or one of those wonderful Greek myths does. The image of the sea, of the great, huge white whale speaks to us in MOBY DICK. So do the indomitable icebergs and howling blizzards of the frozen North, and so does the monster that lies beneath.

To me, SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is about how modern man is destroying what is best in the world with science and technology. I feel very deeply that this is so, and it causes me great pain and sadness, and this book stirred all of those emotions and gave them life and shape and imagery.

One of my favorite images is Smilla as a grown woman, remembering nursing at her mother's breast, and how beautiful she remembered her mother to be, and the nature of that beauty. What is more elemental and natural, and removed from modern European man, than a Greenlandic Eskimo pausing to suckle her infant during a hunting trip? What is more removed from modern life than an Eskimo traveling over ice and snow and glaciers to hunt for food, orienting herself by developing intimate knowledge of every detail of snow and ice, plus a special, unexplainable instinct?

Smilla remembers life with her mother, living as a Greenlandic Eskimo, as a Paradise, even though life in Greenland is one of the harshest on the earth for humans, and even though the life of the Greenlandic Eskimo is often very shot and fraught with danger. And yet being torn from that life was the worst thing that ever happened to her and being part of that life was the best thing that ever happened to her.

Paradise Lost. That is what SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is about to me. What does that feel like to someone who has never been an Eskimo? SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW evokes that. Who are the enemies of one who has lost paradise? Read SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW.

Scandinavian Books

• Books > Subjects > Literature & Fiction > World Literature
• Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery