Smilla’s Sense of Snow | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

I hardly ever watch thrillers, since I get emotionally over-involved in them, and hence nervous. However, I was fascinated by the premise of this novel when I first read a review of it–Smilla who can read snow. I remember studying in linguistics that people find words for what is important to them. The Eskimos, for instance, are supposed to have 17 words to describe snow.

(The Handbook of North American Indians (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas. …just as English uses derived terms for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning ‘water’ in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput ‘snow on the ground’, gana ‘falling snow’, piqsirpoq ‘drifting snow’, and qimuqsuq ‘a snow drift.)

I wanted to read this book about this woman who could read snow. But time being the finite element that is, I watched the film instead.

It has the rarefied unsmiling quality of most Scandinavian films, but it also a totally gripping story of the conflict between big business whose money reaches up and down the corridors of power and society, and an individual determined to find the murderer of a six year old boy, even if it kills her. I particularly liked the portrayal of the six year old doomed boy, Isaiah, and his relationship with Smilla.

We watched it on a lethargic Sunday when we couldn’t find the energy to do anything else. I can think of worse ways of spending an evening.