The City: Part 1

Smilla's Sense of Snow opens in Copenhagen, Denmark, "the city" alluded to in the section title. The very short first chapter locates the scene in a Greenlanders' cemetery during the funeral for Isaiah, a young Inuit boy, killed by falling from the roof of a warehouse. The chapter also introduces the reader to the first-person narrator, Smilla, as well as to Isaiah's mother, Juliane, and the mechanic, later identified as Peter Føjl. Although the chapter is just a little over two pages long, it closes with an important insight for Smilla, an insight that sustains her through the rest of the novel: "All along I must have had a comprehensive pact with Isaiah not to leave him in the lurch, never, not even now."

The story turns in the next chapters to a series of flashbacks. In the first, Smilla recounts returning late...