Word: qaavigaaq
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...Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Denmark's exploitation of Greenland's mineral resources seems an unlikely background for a detective thriller about the mysterious death of a six-year-old Inuit boy. Unlikely too is the investigator, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her hunter-tracker mother and the well-appointed world of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Like Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California, Hoeg creates an unfamiliar but palpable world that steadily envelops the reader...
That's the antiestablishment view of Hoeg's heroine, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her mother, a hunter and tracker, and the comfortable wealth of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Smilla knows both science and snow, but she is too rebellious to work regularly for the ruling Danes. She is at loose ends in Copenhagen when a six-year-old Eskimo boy she has befriended slips from the snowy roof of their apartment house and is killed. An accident, of course; but the boy, Smilla knows, wouldn't normally have been...
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