OBOC - Denmark (and Greenland?)

While Isak Dinesen was the obvious choice for Denmark, I didn't want to read about Kenya for Denmark (especially given that i am not a big fan of the short story format). So I went with Peter Hoeg and his most famous novel "Smilla's Sense of Snow".

Little did I know that I would hit two countries with one book, and honestly I learned more about Greenland than about Denmark through this one. But hey, what else can one expect when the heroine of the novel is a Greenlander with a great sense for snow (she prefers the solid state to the liquid one clearly). Smilla is a cross between Houdini (she can walk on water and go through locked doors) and a nerdy Clint Eastwood (in every single brooding portrayal). In fact if this book had a hero instead of a heroine I am sure it would've been made into a Clint Eastwood movie along the lines of Gran Torino.

The daughter of an Eskimo woman and a Danish doctor, Smilla migrates to Denmark to live in the "White Palace" - a piece of land donated by the Housing Authority and the home of many migrants. She liked to be left to herself and hated any form of control ("detest passport and birth certificates, government control and demands"). Her only companions were books on Euclidean geometry and her neighbor the 6 year old Isaiah a fellow Greenlander like her.

When Isaiah meets with his mysterious death falling from the snow covered roof of the white palace, Smilla refuses to believe that it was an accident. The snow had its own way of revealing its mysteries to Smilla that she doesn't rest until she unravels what happened to Isaiah on the snow covered roof. The mystery leads us to Isaiah's father who died on the job, the corporation he worked for, the mysterious people who run the corporation, the many voyages between Greenland and Copenhagen financed by the company to smuggle into Denmark something bigger than drugs, something alive from Gela Alta.

Peter Hoeg keeps the pace gripping most of the time (although you find it pretty easy to unravel what's at the end), and along the way educates the reader on many scientific topics from glacial snow to astronomy to mathematics and tropical parasites. But what made the book very interesting to me, is the character development of Smilla - her voice, her sarcasm, her passion for the obscure. In any piece of writing I find analogies very fascinating and this book was so full of them. ("The number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. Like the numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing. Do you know the mathematical expression for longing? The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you're missing something"). It is remarkable that Peter Hoeg pulled off a complicated female voice with such ease.

The other theme was colonization by Denmark of Greenland and the effect it has on the Inuits.Morality has also been explored quite a bit - what is the moral code of Scientists and Science? role of religion etc.

Overall I liked the book, but i found it rambling in certain sections and Hoeg could've used a good editor. So it doesn't rank too high on my list of suspense novels. But I loved Smilla - just like the glaciers that she is so fond of, on the surface she is cold, but with depth you find she is actually warmer than you expected.