jorn's Full Review: Peter Hoeg and Tiina Nunnally - Smilla's Sense of ...
I had heard the title of this book a million times before I heard it called a thriller-- I had thought it was some kind of Oprah-bookclub weeper.
But the notion of a thriller with an Oprah-weepy title piqued my curiosity, so I tracked it down at the library. The writing style took me a very long time to get used to-- oblique and Scandinavian-existential. The story seemed unpromising: a featureless woman investigates the death, in Copenhagen, of an Inuit boy from Greenland.
The story is narrated from her point of view, and it took me a very long time to start accepting her as female (the author is male). What kept me going, though, were the many fascinating observations about science and psychology and life in Denmark and Greenland, that were brought in along the way.
And as the story progresses, Smilla (the narrator) gradually emerges as a wonderfully resourceful and intuitive amateur James Bond, with scene after scene notching up the level of wonder.
I made the mistake of looking up Roger Ebert's review of the movie about halfway in, because I wondered who had played Smilla (Julia Ormond, wildly miscast). It was a mistake because Ebert's first sentence contains spoilers for the book that aren't clarified until the last ten pages, literally-- and they're the weakest part of the book, imho.
She thinks more highly of snow and ice than she does of love. She lives in a world of numbers, science and memories--a dark, exotic stranger in a stra...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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