SOURCE: "Fiction Chronicle," in Partisan Review, Vol. LXI, No. 1, Winter, 1994, pp. 80-95.

In the following excerpt, Bell offers a mixed assessment of Smilla's Sense of Snow, praising the characterization of Smilla but lamenting Høeg's loss of focus towards the end of the novel.

There are impenetrable mysteries of a very different kind in Smilla's Sense of Snow by the young Danish novelist Peter Hoeg. For one thing it's hard to figure out what genre this dense and tantalizing story belongs to—is it a murder mystery, science fiction, morality tale, or an intricately plotted adventure wrapped in a carapace of technical information, a la Tom Clancy? At first reading, it appears to be a manically complicated thriller narrated by a truculent, ferociously opinionated, erudite, disorganized, strangely beguiling woman of thirty-seven named Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, her mother an Inuit of Greenland, her father a world-renowned Danish anesthesiologist who...