Categories: uncategorized
Date: 03 February 2006 23:49:41
It's dark by the time I take the train back. The wind carries a light snow with it, pirhuk. My mind registers it as if through an anaesthetic.
In a big city you adopt a particular way of regarding the world. A focused, sporadically selective view. When you scan a desert or an ice floe, you see with different eyes. You let the details slip out of focus in favour of the whole. This way of seeing reveals a different reality. If you look at someone's face in this manner, it starts to dissolve into a shifting series of masks.
With this way of seeing, a person's breath in the cold - that veil of cooled drops that forms in the air in temperatures under -8`C - is not merely a phenomenon fifty centimetres from his mouth. It's something all-encompassing, a structural transformation of the space surrounding a warm-blooded creature, an aura of minimal but definite thermal replacement. I've seen hunters shoot snow hares in a starless winter night at a distance of two hundred and fifty metres by aiming at the fog around them.
I am not a hunter. And I'm asleep inside. Maybe I'm close to giving up. But I sense him when I'm fifty metres away, before he hears me. He's standing between the two marble pillars which flank the gate leading from Strandvejen to the stairs.
In the city, in the Nørrebro district, people stand on streetcorners and in doorways; it doesn't mean anything. But on Strandvejen it is significant. And besides, I've grown hypersensitive. So I shrug off the resignation, take several steps backwards, and slip into next door's garden.
I really enjoyed this book. The main character Smilla is skilfully developed and is beautifully intriguing, a woman born in Greenland who now lives in Denmark and is an expert on ice. The setting is the cold depths of winter, and her knowledge of all things snow and ice leads her on a compelling quest when she becomes suspicious after examining the snow around the dead body of a boy from her apartment block.
One thing I love is the way Høeg develops the plot. It starts out with a small suspicion on the part of Smilla and grows slowly throughout the book. Revelation is drawn out, and this kept me totally enthralled. Even small events within the book will not be explained until half a chapter later, and the reader is often kept one step behind Smilla as she makes connections between people and events to reveal a plot that involves scientists, Greenland, ice and the death of a little boy.
Highly recommended.