noisedfisk

Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow

2005.07.04

— Music

It is freezing, an extraordinary -18°C, and it’s snowing, and in the language which is no longer mine, the snow is qanik – big almost weightless crystals falling in stacks and covering the ground with a layer of pulverised white frost. Peter Hí¸eg

For those of you who haven’t read the comment under my post about Efterklang, have a look at this page. You’ll find nice videos of Efterklang as well as several interesting links. And since you’re there, enjoy Tiny Ways, it’s a great blog worth reading, with many great things about Scandinavian (or not) “tiny” sounds…

Well, I didn’t mean to talk about Efterklang again, even though the more I listen to the album, the more I like it. As I said, it’s the kind of music you should listen to when reading a scandinavian novel, such as Hí¸eg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow. Well, maybe you’d better wait till next winter, though, since it’s the typical winter novel…

The plot looks simple. One winter evening a six-year-old boy falls to his death from the apartment roof in Copenhagen. Accidental death, say the police. But Smilla Jaspersen, a resourceful, tenacious and bloody-minded Greenlander, knows the boy well; moreover she has a feeling for snow – and those last footprints tell her a tale… more complicated than expected. And even though the end, which leads Smilla to Greenland, is slightly disappointing, this novel creates an atmosphere of his own that makes it much more original than most crime-novels I have read…

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