Synopsis (Credit: Back cover)

One winter evening, the neighbour's six-year-old boy falls to his death from an 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 ...  Her investigation starts in Denmark and leads to the Arctic ice cap as Smilla doggedly homes in on her quarry.

Time Magazine Best Fiction Book of the Year 1993.
On the Combined 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die List.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow is the UK translation of the original Danish book. The US translation is titled Smilla's Sense of Snow. For an interesting analysis of the differences between the two translations, read A Tale of Two Smillas by Kirsten Malmkjær.

-- There is more than one copy of the book on my bookshelf --

(Bought second-hand at CAFDA Charity Bookshop, Regent Avenue, Sea Point.)

I can't help feeling that later books in this genre, some of them very popular and successful today, owe a lot to this powerful yet nuanced tale. There are many more textures here than in comparative thrillers and crime mysteries.

Excerpt:
There is one way to understand another culture. Living it. Move into it, ask to be tolerated as a guest, learn the language. At some point understanding may come. It will always be wordless. The moment you grasp what is foreign, you will lose the urge to explain it. To explain a phenomenon is to distance yourself from it.

Given to Izikhova.

This book was released as part of the 1001 BYMRBYD October 2012 release challenge.

Received from Stoepbrak.