Word: smilla
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Dates: during 1993-1993
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TELEVISION HBO recounts the history of the AIDS epidemic, gingerly. BOOKS Smilla's Sense of Snow is a riveting thriller set in Denmark and Greenland. Scott Smith's first novel, A Simple Plan, needs work. Willie Morris goes golly-gee in his memoir, New York Days. CINEMA True Romance is true carnage. MUSIC A cheap shot at the underclass mars an appealing new album by Garth Brooks...
...killed a harmless boy? Come to think of it, where does his alcoholic mother get her money? Smilla begins to poke into a mystery that no one else acknowledges. Answers disappear in the gray, corporate fog that surrounds a great mining conglomerate. The police warn her roughly to stop annoying important citizens. She is befriended -- Why? Simply because she's good- looking? -- by a hulking, silent man, a mechanic, who seems to have had a violent past...
...storyteller's ancient, changeless pattern develops, working as well in Denmark and Greenland as it did for Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California and for Martin Cruz Smith and the series that began with Gorky Park in Moscow. Smilla puts her nose in harm's way and gets it bloodied. Like Archer and like Smith's Russian cop Arkady Renko, she keeps on poking. She's in peril in a glossy casino near Copenhagen, on a powerful, mysteriously equipped icebreaker plowing north toward Greenland, on the floating metal atoll of a huge fueling dock, and finally...
...does this pull so strongly at the imagination? Partly (though this is the least of the elements) because the puzzle is good: Is the icebreaker really prepared to bring back something that has been living for centuries in the Greenland ice? Partly because, seen by Smilla under stress, the background texture -- the casino, the sinister ship -- has the grain-by-grain fascination of a prison cell's stone wall. And finally because Smilla is good company. She's interesting, full of odd quirks and skewed perspectives: someone you'd enjoy talking with over a long dinner...
TELEVISION HBO recounts the history of the AIDS epidemic, gingerly. BOOKS Smilla's Sense of Snow is a riveting thriller set in Denmark and Greenland. Scott Smith's first novel, A Simple Plan, needs work. Willie Morris goes golly-gee in his memoir, New York Days. CINEMA True Romance is true carnage. MUSIC A cheap shot at the underclass mars an appealing new album by Garth Brooks...