Smilla's Sense of Snow (Peter Hoeg)

I had heard of this movie. It was an indie flick quite a few years ago that I always meant to see yet didn't. After reading the book, I'm rather glad as it seems the plot would never fit neatly into movie form without losing a great deal of complexity. Don't get me wrong, I will see it now. I'm just glad I had the experience of this very engrossing novel beforehand.

A novel about Smilla Jasperson, a Greenlandic native living in Denmark, a scientist by education, an excellent dresser, an introvert to the extreme, a woman caught between her youth and her present in the colonizing power who took over her homeland, a woman obsessed and I mean obsessed by ice and snow. Smilla's neighbor is a little boy who is also Greenlandic, with a drunk for a mother and a horrible end--dying by falling off a roof. Though his footprints in the snow show he was alone, Smilla senses foul play and this "sense of snow" leads her on an engrossing chase with all the frills. Conspiracies, explosions, fist fights, ice expeditions, sex, viruses, riches, autopsies...

You get the point. It's a thriller and a mystery, which usually isn't my style. It is, however, very well done for it's genre. Hoeg gets inside this very cold character of Smilla, isolated, intelligent, who sees the world and relationships in terms of winter, ice, fog, snow. Crystalization, temperatures, geometry. A thriller told by character sketch. A character that can walk on water (well, on the fragile ice that drifts on the surface but, hey, still cool). I don't know if I find the ultimate conclusion satisfying. As in all mysteries, this conclusion is supposed to answer all the questions of the rest of the book, retroactively explaining every event before. It seemed a bit implausible, or maybe the word is far fetched, the big giant conspiracy leading up to.... you'll see. And if you got sucked in like I did, beware the Dyson vacuum cleaner of Smilla!, you will definitely enjoy the ride.