Genre

The term "genre" refers to the category of a given literary work in either form or content. In terms of content, certain genres carry with them certain conventions. For example, detective fiction requires both a crime and someone trying to solve the crime. Thus, while a book such as Smilla's Sense of Snow is clearly generically a novel, it does not easily fall into any one generic category in terms of content and convention. Indeed, it is almost as if Høeg is playing with the notion of genre itself in his creation of this novel.

The story opens with the trappings of a murder mystery: a death under mysterious circumstances, a protagonist with the information and motive she needs to begin an investigation, a multitude of clues, and a cast of interesting and diverse characters. At the same time, the novel is also of the "thriller...