Book Review

[venta]

OK, so I'm about five years behind with "the book it's cool to be seen to be reading right now":

(Anyone know what the book of the moment is, at the ...er... moment?)



Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Peter Høeg

I picked this up in a second hand bookshop, mostly because I remembered a lot of people talking about it. It was translated from Danish. And that's pretty much all I knew about it.

For some reason, I was incredibly surprised to discover it was basically a whodunnit. Maybe because crime novels rarely get hailed as great literature.

I'm very bad at reading modern crime novels. Give me a nice locked-room, four-people-and-the-butler style whodunnit and I'm fine. But anything with a vaguely 20th-century realistic approach to crime, and I'm all at sea. They always seem to involve a ferociously large cast of characters, at least four continents and bewildering police procedure.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow does hop about a bit, both geographically and temporally, but does so with sufficient clarity that it's not at all confusing. I did occasionally lose track of who was who, but I think that's just because I'm very bad at keeping track of characters. The police, thankfully, are barely involved.

To be honest, I'd have enjoyed it without the overarching plot (which is actually rather good). Firstly, there's the snow. This book does what it says on the tin. Central character: Miss Smilla. And she has an uncanny feeling for, and ability to read, snow. And ice. And other cold stuff. You know snow, the white stuff that hangs about in winter ?

No. It's much more than that. Smilla is part-Greenlander, and talks as someone who's lived both a Western lifestyle, and a traditional Greenlandic lifestyle. And provides endless, and fascinating, commentary on the snows and ices around her, mixing up meteorology, geology, folklore, the crystal structure of the stuff, and the practicalities of living with it.

Then again, I'm a sucker for listening to someone being enthusiastic about their own subject.

Secondly, there's Smilla herself. Høeg has written a heroine who is compelling, intriguing, and who had my sympathy with her all the way - despite not actually being desperately likeable in some ways. Not that she's nasty, or does unpleasant things, she's just someone who you can't imagine being an easy person to be around. And one of the most thoroughly drawn, and convincing, characters I've read in a while.

This isn't a nice, fluffy winter feelgood book. And it requires you to think occasionally. But it is very fine.

Available to borrow as of now :)

Comments

[mrph.livejournal.com]

I might well take you up on that - people I know have been praising it for a while, and I've never managed to actually buy/read it.

Book of the moment is, I guess. the new Donna Tartt - "The Little Friend". I do actually have this one (although I haven't finished it yet), although that's mostly because I read her last one (The Secret History) five years late and was impressed enough to pre-order the new one. I'm enjoying it enough to be scarily virtuous and skip the synopsis in the Guardian Editor. :)

Alternative book of the moment is probably the new Umberto Eco, Baudolino, which I know absolutely nothing about. But it's Umberto Eco, so I'll probably read it sooner or later anyway - he's reliably good, in my view.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Never mind book of the moment, Alabama 3 have a new album out, "Power in the Blood".

So you aren't even listening to the sweet pretty acid house country and western music of the moment.