MISS SMILLA’S FEELING FOR SNOW – Romance by Peter Høeg

All his works are stylistically very different from one another. He has a reputation for being hard to place in terms of literary style. He is a Danish writer of fiction, and was born in Copenhagen (Denmark), but before becoming a writer, he worked variously as a sailor, ballet dancer and actor. He received a Master of Arts in Literature in 1984. Peter Høeg, published his first novel in 1988. Over the next five years he wrote and published the short story collection Tales of Night, and the novels: Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. It was Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow that earned Høeg immediate and international literary celebrity. For Smilla’s Sense of Snow, he won the Glass Key Award from the Crime Writers of Scandinavia in 1993.

The novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (or Smilla’s Sense of Snow), https://www.amazon.co.uk/Miss-Smillas-Feeling-Snow-Peter/dp/1860461670 is a work of detection and a thriller. Although beneath the surface of the novel, Høeg is concerned with rather deeper cultural issues, particularly Denmark’s curious post-colonial history. During her Greenland childhood, Smilla developed an almost intuitive understanding of all types of snow and their characteristics. As an adult she worked for a time as a scientist whose speciality was snow and ice. Her certainty about the manner of a child’s death is due to this visceral “feeling for snow”. Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen, 37-year-old product of the stormy union of a female Inuit hunter and a rich urban Danish physician, is a loner who struggles to live with her fractured heritage.