![]() ![]() ![]() Both adult protagonists confront the difficulty of engaging in multiple forms of translation between cultures and individuals, partly through the figure of an abused boy whose care they have assumed. Isaiah becomes deaf after enduring multiple untreated ear infections, to the point where he “couldn’t hear a thing” (Høeg 497). Hulme’s Kerewin Holmes is a half Māori and half Pākehā woman who adopts the mute boy Simon, and Høeg’s Smilla Jaspersen is a half Inuit and half Danish woman who fosters the deaf boy Isaiah, whose deceased father and alcoholic, often absent mother are both Inuits. Both novels explore hybridity, in part, through the figure of the single female surrogate parent of a symbolically or partly orphaned child. In this essay, I try to account for the unlikely affinities between Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, published in New Zealand in 1984, and Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, published in Denmark in 1992. ![]()
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