Book Analysis

Book Analysis

Peter Høeg's breakthrough novel "Smilla's Sense of Snow" (1992), is about the dominant Smilla Jaspersen Qaavigaaq of 37, half Greenlander, half Dane, and her struggle to find the truth. We meet Smilla first time at a funeral in the winter in December must- down in Copenhagen. The reason for this is a small Greenlandic boy's unusual death. Boy Isaiah, fell from a roof a winter day. The police quickly conclude that he has been playing on the roof was got too close to the edge and fell down, but tracks end in the snow runs directly against the edge and the certain death, which is a mystery to Smilla. Smilla does not however consider that the incident is an accident. She has a "6 sense ", namely her feeling for snow, and when the snow on the roof tells her something else about Isaiah's death than one person's opinion, she believes that there has been a murder, and gives himself in the process of solve the riddle that is in any mystery novel, "Who is the culprit?" Her search for answers and Truth evolves rapidly from a single individual's mysterious death to many.

The first part of the crime-thriller Smilla's Sense of Snow takes place in Denmark in early beginning of the nineties - more precisely in Copenhagen 1992 and 1993. Peter Hoeg paints a bleak Image of Denmark, where normal citizens can not feel pressing against the authorities, which are both power-hungry and corrupt. The bleak picture is aided by Smilla which an eccentric and dark protagonist. Peter Hoeg is very critical of the way wealthy people throwing their money away , and in this extravagance lose their purpose in life and perhaps also their personality. One can say that the rich people who already lacks a purpose, is the casino especially enticing since it completion of the aircraft- that gap. "- The parasite, the gambler, sweetheart. One of the most hungry predators in the world it. And I know what I'm talking about. I've lost everything several times. But I am come again. That's why I had to buy myself. Now that I own, now that I have seen from the rear, it has been different, "1 Parasite concept is echoed later in the novel, and it gives the referenced opinion of Lander extra weight. In the novel, we meet all the social strata of society, from the bottom, represented by Juliane to the upper class represented by the Lander.

Smilla's background, which "allows" her to move in all these layers, since she herself is a mixture of them, by which Peter Hoeg opportunity to demonstrate his professional knowledge in many different areas such as the following quotation: "- Neokatastrofisme is an umbrella term. The term was created by Schinde- wolf, sometime in the sixties. He was a paleontologist. ... "What they have in common is think- tions on the globe - and particularly its biology - have evolved not evenly but in ...