Smilla's Sense of Snow

As I mentioned at the end of my series about Stieg Larsson, I was thinking back to the first Scandinavian mystery I read, which was most likely Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg. I may have spotted some Wahlöö/Sjöwal procedurals on a family friend’s shelf earlier than that, but I don’t recall cracking them open.

Given the publication date of the paperback edition, and a few chronological markers of my own, I’m guessing I read Smilla’s Sense of Snow some time in the fall of 1994. I turned twenty-four that November, and had just returned to New York after bouncing around a couple of other cities after college. Recently, as I was preparing to reread the book, I looked at a few reviews from the time, all of which mentioned Smilla’s notably distant and caustic personality—little trace of which remained in my memory. I’m pretty sure I related to her alienation, at the time.

My return to NYC that fall was something of a crash-landing. I’d spent the summer with a college friend in Cambridge, MA, thinking that I would stay there for a while. Soon after I arrived, however, I discovered that my friend was having major mental health issues of a kind that made her impossible to live with. She kept thinking I had allied with her other friends against her, and repeatedly accused me of obscure acts of betrayal. Wholly unequipped to deal with this situation, I ended up calling my mom to come get me. Once at home, I felt shaky and wary and deeply curious about why I felt so implicated by my friend’s problems. In this mood, I could read for hours about an aloof misanthropic woman who did not fit into either her surroundings or her abandoned homeland, whose only real connection to the world was her dead six-year-old neighbor.

Reading Smilla’s Sense of Snow now, I’m amazed at the connection I had to it the first time around. I still felt the original pull of the first chapter or so, but after that I could no longer relate. In the middle of the book Smilla spends about a hundred pages at sea, the entire section of which advances the plot about two lines’ worth of information. Smilla also meets a whole new cast of characters on this voyage, for no apparent reason. This detour might have been all right if the new set of characters stood out in any way from the first. But their indeterminate construction sits on top of an already wobbly foundation. At some point early on, I asked the pages of the book out loud, “Why does absolutely everybody’s name begin with ‘L’?” There is a Lübing, a Lagermann, a Loyen, a Licht, a Lukas, and possibly others but I lost track. So many that Høeg has to be doing it on purpose. Did he intend them as more of a Greek chorus of clue-givers, rather than distinct personalities? Was he trying to push the bounds of detective fiction? See just how far could he take the absurdist streak in the story and still have the whodunit junkies hang on for the big reveal?

For me, circa 1994, the answer was—quite far! Though even then I had an inkling that the criminal element was a ruse. I thought it was really about something else, something I wanted to know. At the time, I imagined that there was something mystical about the properties of snow that form the spine of the book. These days, I’m more focused on the fact that Høeg’s background is in comp lit. Different themes jump out at me now.

I’ll get into some of these themes in Part II.