Word: hoeg
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gone for Danish novelist Peter Hoeg, who followed his brilliant thriller, Smilla's Sense of Snow, with a couple of mannered, too-clever fictions, A History of Danish Dreams and Borderliners, that found their balance somewhere between interesting and irritating. And the glum report here is that Hoeg's latest novel, The Woman and the Ape (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 261 pages; $23), is a disaster, part animal-rights tract and part millennial doom mongering, that looks at irritating from the underside...
...STRONG SUBSURface themes of Smilla's Sense of Snow, the fine 1993 thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish novelist then new to America, was a slyly expressed contempt for what the author saw as his country's bourgeois self-satisfaction. This much relished contempt and cheerfully malign slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 356 pages; $24), which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles...
...Hoeg's ferocious burlesque, burgerlich awfulness has its own flavor in Denmark. One of his best chapters has a dissolute theology student, who has been drinking, whoring and mocking his professors for several years, sneering as his negligee-clad girlfriend reads him a letter from home. "Your father is dead," she reports. "To hell with him," says he. Just then his mother's portrait falls off the wall to the floor. His shallow rebellion vanishes at this omen. He sinks to his knees, repents and returns home to preach hellfire to amazed and grateful peasants. If Dreams is regarded...
...publishing sleeper of 1993 proved to be, rather surprisingly, a , translation from the Danish. Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow enchanted reviewers and book buyers alike with its suspense -- a wise woman detective tries to track down a child's murderer -- and its eerie rendering of the landscapes and atmosphere of Greenland. This intense but accessible philosophical thriller spurred considerable interest in what Hoeg, 37, would do for an encore...
That's the antiestablishment view of Hoeg's heroine, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her mother, a hunter and tracker, and the comfortable wealth of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Smilla knows both science and snow, but she is too rebellious to work regularly for the ruling Danes. She is at loose ends in Copenhagen when a six-year-old Eskimo boy she has befriended slips from the snowy roof of their apartment house and is killed. An accident, of course; but the boy, Smilla knows, wouldn't normally have been...