Smilla is the fictional creation of Danish author Peter Hoeg, in the 1992 novel Froken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (literally, Miss Smilla's Sense for Snow). This was translated into English and published in America in 1993 as Smilla's Sense of Snow. The novel and movie take place in the present. The novel is narrated by Smilla. The movie Smilla is at least 5 years younger than the Smilla of the novel, who is 37. The scriptwriter seems to have tried very hard to keep as much of the novel's dialogue, scenes, and characters as possible. However, the novel's interest in the role of Denmark in Greenlandic development, which is of passionate interest to Smilla and central to her character, is lost in the film version.Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen was born (according to Peter Hoeg's novel) in 1956, in Qaanaq or Thule, in the northwestern part of Greenland. (In the movie, she presumably would have been born in 1965, the same year as Julia Ormond, who plays her.) Her mother was Ane Quavigaaq, an Inuit hunter (a rare calling for a woman), her father Moritz Jaspersen, a Danish doctor who had planned a short stay in Greenland but ended up falling in love and starting a family; Smilla had a brother. When Smilla was six, her mother was lost at sea while hunting. Her father brought her back to Denmark and installed her in a series of boarding schools, from which she kept running away, actually making it back to Greenland twice. She did very badly in all her schools. Eventually she found her vocation studying mathematics and glaciation, and became an indispensible guide on various types of expeditions and scientific research projects involving the Arctic. At one point she was part of a group of Inuit glaciologists studying how to situate oil-drilling equipment on the ice.She became involved with the Council of Young Greenlanders and the Inuit Ataqatigiit (Inuit Brotherhood), a leftist party campaigning for complete independence from Denmark. In the meantime, her brother, who had made a living as a hunter like his mother, lost his market or job because of changes in Danish policy, became an alcoholic, and killed himself. Her father, who had become very rich as an anaesthetist, devoted himself to golf and eventually acquired (or was acquired by) a teenaged dancer, Benja, as a companion,For reasons that are not perfectly clear, at the beginning of the novel/film Smilla is unemployed. She may have been blackballed by possible employers because of her political activities; or she may have become disillusioned with many of her possible employers, seeing that they are driven by greed and disregard for the environment and the rights and needs of the Inuit. She is living in a kind of housing project/apartment complex she calls the White Palace ,in Copenhagen, right on the harbor, home to a mix of people including Inuits on welfare and others living on the edge. She still indulges in fine clothing and other luxuries, presumably thanks to support from her father. (At one point in the novel/film, she asks Moritz for a prescription with five figures, i.e. a check.)Smilla is evidently an attractive woman, but she does not seem to have any fond memories of love relationships from the past. At 37, she is very much alone, though she has allowed little Isaiah, the Inuit boy from downstairs, to become a friend, a kind of surrogate son (since his mother is usually disabled by drink). She doesn't think much of the Danes, to say the least, but she also feels completely cut off from her Greenlandic heritage: she can no longer speak the language properly, she has probably worked for companies and governments that hurt Greenland, she doesn't want to be drunk like Juliana and many other Inuits in Copenhagen. In moments of stress she refers to herself as Smilla the fake Greenlander. She is deeply angry, without having a person or institution to be completely angry at, since she understands also the good sides and the vulnerabilities of her enemies--her father, the Danes. When she becomes involved in investigating Isaiah's death, her anger and paranoia take her into situations where anger and paranoia are completely justified--survival skills.Peter Fjol, the other main protagonist in the novel/movie, is refered to by Smilla (the novel's narrator) mostly as the mechanic. He is dyslexic and stutters, but he is clever at making things and fixing things, and superhumanly strong (in the book, he literally bends steel with his bare hands). The movie shows briefly a scar at his wrist but does not explain that, when he was the Danish equivalent of a Navy SEAL, he saved the life of another man (Lander) by diving under the ice without tanks or gloves; the resultant pressure on his dive suit marked his ankles and wrists. He is also a fine cook and plays earth mother to Smilla (and Isaiah). In some ways, the book hints at an allegory in which he is the body and Smilla the mind or soul--the part that speaks, thinks things out in every direction, is angry or happy, considers suicide, walks on water. Under her fine clothes, there is not much of her, and she needs him to survive. Show less «