Word: hoeg
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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...
...proves to be an athletic lover, which is fortunate, since the couple's bed is 75 ft. in the air. But he is not much more sensitive to inter-primate relationships than a suit-wearing human male. Hoeg causes Madelene to brood, with the gluey profundity that clots his novel: "Deep inside, for the first time in her life, she came to terms with the fact that even the one you love you cannot ever fully understand...
...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...