History of Danish Dreams

From Publishers Weekly
Hoeg's first novel is a satiric look at Danish social history. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In a series of linked vignettes that move from 16th-century aristocratic arrogance to 20th-century social crisis, Hoeg offers a wildly inventive account of Danish history. He opens with the story of Carl Laurids, a steward's son at the manor of Morkhoj, where time has stood still for four centuries following a decree from the count. Amalie Teander, scion of a newspaper family whose matriarch cannot read but magically predicts the future; Anna Bak, a parson's daughter who seems to be one of God's elect; Adonis Jensen, who veers from the family profession of thievery?all are remarkable creations embedded in an ornate, carefully observed text. In the book's second half, these characters link up in explosive combinations. While profoundly different in style from the suspenseful Smilla's Sense of Snow (LJ 8/93) and Borderland (LJ 8/94), a hard-edged social fable, this new novel?actually, the author's first, though the third published here?sustains Hoeg's attack on conformity and social injustice. A dark but brilliant fairy tale; highly recommended.-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Readers of Hoeg's best-selling Smilla's Sense of Snow (1993) are in for a surprise if they expect this novel to grip them the way Smilla did. Whereas that book, and Hoeg's second novel published in the U.S., Borderliners (1994), combine twisting, open-ended thriller plots with compelling philosophical ruminations on such abstract issues as time and solitude, this more ambitious but less successful work leaves out the thriller plot and replaces it with a tangled, multigenerational saga spanning four centuries of Danish history and attempting to chart the effect on the citizenry's inner lives of the move from a medieval society to a modern welfare state. The characters, ranging from an obsessed landowner in the sixteenth century, who attempts to stop time while he searches for the secret to the universe, to a master criminal who fails in passing along his talent to his son, are saddled with so much symbolic baggage that they are never able to emerge as individuals or make us feel their pain. Significantly, this book was Hoeg's first novel, published in Denmark before either Smilla or Borderliners. That is exactly how it reads--as the awkward but intermittently brilliant attempt of a uniquely talented writer to funnel his overarching vision of life in the twentieth century into a form that can support it and into a narrative that can make it breathe. The breathing is labored here, but the vision still sparkles: unlike so many modern writers who are only willing to work on a small scale, Hoeg wants to tackle the big issues in a big way. If his Dickensian ambition leads inevitably to illusions of grandeur, it also leads to Smilla a near-perfect melding of form, content, and character. Smilla's fans will want to read this book, too, but they are likely to be disappointed when Hoeg's reach exceeds his grasp. Bill Ott


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Danish


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Hoeg's first novel is a satiric look at Danish social history. (Nov.)


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