In her late thirties and more or less self-sufficient in life, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is the product of Dr Jørgen Moritz Jaspersen, a Danish physician, and Ane Qaavigaaq, a Greenlandic ‘hunter’. She suspects foul play in the death of a young child, who has fallen from a roof, by way of the marks in the snow, and from this the mystery begins to unwind, albeit extremely slowly throughout the whole, however, Smilla’s observations show she has a feeling for ice. The eponymous Smilla is portrayed as an expert in ice formations. David originally published as Frøken Smillas Fornemmelse for Sne, Munksgaard/Rosinante, Copenhagen, 1992) is, in some sense, mis-titled. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (The Harvill Press, 1996, translated from the original Danish by F. It becomes an opaque slush: intricately convoluted, intermittently incomprehensible, and with stultifying plotting. It slips and slides for over four hundred pages, never fully being anchored on the land of Copenhagen, in the seas of the North Atlantic, or on the ice west of Greenland. Høeg’s writing doesn’t so much as lose its way as never really finding a way in the first place. Peter Høeg offers us a mystery for the unravelling, but it is a tangle so tightly woven with clues and foreshadowings, with possibilities, with red herrings and tangents that it becomes a bind difficult to extricate the answers from.
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