Isaiah Christensen

Although Isaiah is dead as the novel opens, all events of the story circulate around him. The reader comes to know Isaiah through flashbacks narrated by Smilla and Føjl, who calls the child "the Baron." Isaiah is a young Greenlandic child living with his mother in the White Palace apartments in Copenhagen. He is deathly afraid of heights. He is old beyond his years and turns to Smilla and Føjl when his mother is too drunk to care for him. In Isaiah, Smilla sees a younger version of herself, a transplanted Greenlander ill at ease in Danish culture. There is a mystery surrounding Isaiah as well; Smilla learns after his death that powerful men from the Cryolite Corporation and the Arctic Medicine Institute were studying Isaiah and his response to a dangerous parasite that killed his father while diving in Greenland. Indeed, it...