| Summary: | Biking south from Avignon, brief residence of the popes in southern France, towards Arles, town of bulls and van Gogh, should be a leisurely experience in the smiling Provencal landscape, making no undue demands on one’s physical abilities. That is, providing you stay away from the only obstacle on the way—the fortified hilltop village of Les Baux-de-Provence. An odd (some would say suspect) error of navigation brought us to the top one sunny day in September many years ago, but this detour proved to be well worth the effort. Both the village and the view are spectacular, and well justified claims to fame for Les Baux. However, Les Baux is, or should be, famous for another thing, the ore known as bauxite, discovered in the vicinity of the village by Pierre Berthier in 1821. Through the bauxite ore there is a curious connection between this sunny place of cicadas and pastis in the afternoon shade, and the Greenlandic adventures of Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen. These adventures that, told in the novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, propelled Danish author Peter Høeg to international fame and fortune in 1992. In this bestselling novel, that can be described both as a thriller and as a ‘post-feminist’ critique of Danish colonialism, the mysterious doings of the Cryolite Company of Greenland plays a major role, as does Smilla’s profound knowledge of the solid-state properties of water. A former glaciologist of Danish–Greenlandic origins, she investigates the death of a neighbour’s six-year-old child after a fall from a snow-covered roof, which is dismissed by the police as an accident. She finds herself rummaging in the archives of the Cryolite Company in Copenhagen, examining forensic evidence, and finally joining the crew of an ill-fated expedition to a remote part of Greenland. At first sight, the common denominator between bauxite and cryolite is aluminium. As such, this is not so remarkable: aluminium, right under boron in the Periodic Table, is present in many minerals and ores, and is the third most abundant ...
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