SOURCE: "They Have 23 Words for It," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 26, 1993, pp. 3, 11.

Eder is an American journalist and critic who won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1987. In the following review of Smilla's Sense of Snow, he discusses the novel's characters.

Like John le Carré and Graham Greene before him, Peter Hoeg has given a thriller, Smilla's Sense of Snow, moral and political resonance. As Smilla pursues the killers of an Eskimo boy through Copenhagen and then into the ice fields of Greenland, this outwardly stiff, inwardly passionate and quite unforgettable protagonist is after something larger than a particular crime. Half-Eskimo herself, she is puzzling out a violence that has malformed her own spirit: the corruption of a traditional culture by the greed and technological prowess of the civilized West.

In some ways, Hoeg, a Dane, shows the very particular influence of George Smiley's creator. His...