The Woman and the Ape tells the amazing story of a very unforgettable and special couple – Madelene and Erasmus. They are the main characters in Hoeg’s odd and somewhat warped universe in this brilliant novel. Madelene is the wife of Adam Burden, a distinguished behavioral scientist. Erasmus is strange and very intriguing main character – he is a 300 pound ape! He has escaped captivity by smugglers of endangered species, and is an extremely intelligent anthropoid ape, a type of ape that is very close to human beings. As he escapes, Hoeg immediately starts to weave a masterful tale that immediately spellbinds us.

Madelene Burden decides to save Erasmus, and between them blossoms a profound affection as deep as any human relationship. Madelene feels that Erasmus, ”in its stoic helplessness had reminded her of herself.” This is a great fable for our time, where mankind is evil and the ape noble, and The Woman and the Ape poses searching questions about the nature of love, freedom, and humanity.

Trying to save Erasmus, who turns out to be a very special ape indeed, Madelene escapes with him. The two of them flee through London, ending up in St. Francis Forest, a “pornographic Garden of Eden” within the city walls. But paradise does not last, of course. And as their strange love story progresses we learn much about the adaptability of the ape, and perhaps also about the innermost life of women. If Hoeg is right, we share perhaps more with the apes than we like to think, and therefore may be able to learn much about ourselves from them as well.

The writing in this book is beautiful and very evocative. It is every bit as masterful as that of Smilla’s Sense of Snow. In The Woman and the Ape, Peter Hoeg is humorous, ironic, satirical, lyrical and philosophical. He writes very beautifully, but at the same time raises a number of important and very thought-provoking questions about topics like evolution, civilization versus freedom, and the construction and reconstruction of social identity.

The book is very interesting, well told, has an intriguing and rich plot and an ending with several very surprising elements. I love this book; it is daring and full of unique images and twists. The Woman and the Ape really is a must-read, and a book one does not easily forget.

Links to Peter Hoeg’s books at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Original article: The Woman and the Ape, by Peter Hoeg

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

This collection of short stories was actually the first book published by Peter Hoeg in Denmark. It was originally published in 1990, three years before his internationally acclaimed bestseller Smilla’s Sense of Snow. And while the book may have its short-comings, in the sense that Hoeg at times seems to be distracted from the stories by his own excellent writing, it still is an extraordinary review and a very good collection of stories.

Peter Hoeg’s simple and very fluent language in the stories in Tales of the Night is a rich and well suited medium for the kind of deep, passionate and very intelligent storytelling we meet here. In the stories, Hoeg attacks the conventionality of Danish life as he sees it, with a bureaucratized system, lots of respect for the institutions of science and law, and at the individual level the very heavy, at times burdening and almost rigid sense of duty and obligation. The stories of this book all in one way or other deal with love, a key to human happiness (and misery too) that I feel Hoeg wants to show is something which in all its multiple forms – even in the form of longing – transcend all those more narrowly set boundaries of “the Danish way of life”.

Also, all of the tales take place on and around the 19th March 1929, but in different places geographically as well as in very different social settings. All of the tales seem initially somewhat strange but acquire as you read them a kind of sense or feeling of authenticity and perhaps even truth. Hoeg writes in a way that triggers readers own perceptions – perhaps also in ways that are different from reader to reader.

The stories in Tales of the Night are “Journey into a Dark Heart”, “Hommage à Bournonville”, “The Verdict of the Right Honorable Ignatio Landstad Rasker, Lord Chief Justice”, “An Experiment on the Constancy of Love”, Portrait of the Avant-Garde”, “Pity for the Children of Vaden Town”, “Story of a Marriage”, “Reflection of a Young Man in Balance”.

My personal favorite is the story of the Lord Chief Justice. A young man is shocked to learn about his grandfather’s homosexuality which he sublimated by collecting ships in bottles and to learn, for the first time, why the ”definitive symbol of the Supreme Court,” Ignatio Rasker, ”resigned from his post under circumstances that have never been made public.” It is a delightfully written story with multiple layers of stories within the stories, each adding to one another.

I also liked “Story of a Marriage” a lot. It is a tale about a writer who discovers that the public image of perfection may at times be more than a little at odds with reality, again written in a way where one story is layered inside another in a surprising way.

Overall, the book is very good and very, very interesting. The translation is also excellent. The same original style that we meet in later books by Peter Hoeg is present already in this book – very thick and slow, often almost dreamlike – and the tales are all well written, interesting and very thought-provoking.

Links to Peter Hoeg’s books at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Original article: Tales of the Night, by Peter Hoeg

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

(Also known as “Miss Smilla’s Feeling For Snow,”) this intriguing murder mystery/thriller takes place between Denmark and Greenland. The main protagonist in this story, Smilla Jaspersen, is one of the strongest, most interesting female characters to appear in fiction in a very long time.

The novel is written in theoutstanding and very original style of Peter Hoeg and excellently translated by Tiina Nunnally. It is a book with action, suspense, delicious writing, contradictions and mystery. It is a novel that stunned literary audencies both in Europe and in the United States when it was published. Smilla’s Sense of Snow was selected as “Book of the Year” for 1993 by Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly.

Six year old Isaiah, a Greenlander like Smilla, leaps to his death from the roof of the apartment building in which he lives with his mother. While the boy’s body is still warm, the police pronounce that the death is an accident. But Smilla, who lives in the same building and has come to love the little boy as her own, knows her young neighbor didn’t fall from the rooftop on his own. She knows that he was very afraid of heights. Also, even though there is only one set of footprints on the roof, she still suspects foul play. And her instincts are supported by her “reading” of the footprints. Knowing most of what there is to know about snow and ice, she is ably to see things other people do not – things which cannot easily be communicated, but which are still read and true.

The motive of her initial investigation lies in the kindred spirit she shares with Isaiah, both having been born in Greenland and then brought to Copenhagen after a parent died. But as she learns more, the more intent she is to find the real answer behind this boy’s death. She uncovers a series of conspiracies and cover-ups and quickly realizes that she can trust nobody.

Her investigations into who killed Isaiah and why he was killed begin in Copenhagen, but eventually lead to an adventure on an ice breaking ship and then to an island in the northern part of Greenland. The ending is very surprising.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow is an adventure in the grand tradition, with all the intrigue and occasional scenes of violence and disaster this suggests. It is suspenseful, original, and entertaining. Peter Hoeg proves that serious literature can be both entertaining and artful. A novel of the kind that only comes along very rarely.

Links to Peter Hoeg’s books at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Original article: Smilla’s Sense of Snow, by Peter Hoeg

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

The Quiet Girl is an experimental, avant garde and hard to pin down novel. It is well translated by Nadia Christensen, so it is not, as one reviewer suggested, “Lost in translation”. Rather the novel – which by some has been presented as a thriller, something that it most definitely is not – is extremely complex, somewhat philosophical, and totally mystifying.

The Quiet Girl tells a vague, strange, diffuse, at times unreal and mystical story in a highly non-linear fashion. At times it is nearly realist in its style, at times Hoeg plays with words, symbols and associations and constructs complexes of sentiments, visions and sounds out of thin air that are delightful, but have no contextual references or clear meanings. For example:

“The moment had something of the ending of BWV 565 about it, Toccata and Fugue in D-minor, great fateful pillars of music that stand there briefly before the curtain goes up again.

Yet it leaned slightly toward the romantic. And Kasper knows that the cosmos is not especially romantic. Romance is an extreme position, and all extremes get evened out.”

Peter Hoeg is an exceptional writer and has the ability to grasp, define, construct, de-construct and re-construct settings, sentiments and situations. I read this novel as an experiment both in content and style. Perhaps Peter Hoeg goes too far, perhaps not. Perhaps many of his previous readers cannot, or will not, follow him into the mysterious landscapes and de-constructions of this novel, but perhaps Peter Hoeg even so achieved what he wanted. I don’t know. I just speculate.

What I do know is that while there are fragments of multiple stories and a larger tale in this book, it is a story hard to grasp, elusive, full of magical realism, mystical abilities and correspondences between people, situations, sentiments, and music that are complex, but seemingly non-random.

The main story is about the clown Kasper, who is being investigated for tax evasion and is about to be deported from Denmark to Spain. He is exposed to some fairly strange dealings with governmental officials from Department H and other mysterious ministries and departments. There is a sense of conspiracy. And there are, somewhere in the periphery mostly, people from the circus world who may or may not want to help him. In addition there are some mysterious investors hidden in the shade, and several religious orders involved as well. And in the midst of it all, a group of otherworldly, strange children in possession of mystic gifts that Kasper wants to save – somehow – but from what and why remains unclear.

Reading the novel is a little like looking at a painting by Salvador Dali. To summarize what goes on in the painting or the book is nearly impossible. At times I felt I could not understand, but also that I did not need to understand. Yet I felt somehow strangely attracted to the real sentences, the clever use of images and language constructions and the clever beauty of the text itself. I read, didn’t quite understand, yet felt, sensed and experienced.

So, be warned: This is a difficult, very strange, extremely elusive, avant garde and experimental novel. It is also a novel full of a different kind of beauty, and constructions and re-constructions that you will work with and that you may or may not feel you grasp, even after five readings. It is a strange and obfuscating fable, different from anything else you will ever read.

Links to Peter Hoeg’s books at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Original article: The Quiet Girl, by Peter Hoeg

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

This is a wonderful movie and a great adaptation to film of Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg.

Smilla, brought to Copenhagen against her will after her Inuit mother’s death, is a loner, a rebel against society, who hides her fears and loneliness under a thick coat of armor. She seeks refuge in science – her definition of longing is mathematics’ negative numbers, the “formalization of the feeling that you’re missing something.”

Snow is Smilla Jaspersen’s specialty; it’s what she studies and what she knows better than anybody and anything. So when her only friend, an Inuit boy living in the same Copenhagen apartment complex as her, is found dead on the pavement in front of their house, she knows something must be amiss. He can’t have fallen off the roof, as the police quickly conclude: afraid of heights, he would not have climbed to the roof if not driven there in the first place, and he certainly wouldn’t have run to the edge … as his footsteps in the otherwise untouched snow cover on the roof, however, indicate.

Based on a much-praised 1992 bestseller by Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow is a film of moody power and boundless mystery in its first half, and becomes a conspiracy-laden schock thriller in its second.

Julia Ormond stars as the half-Inuit, Greenland native of Hoeg’s book, and is fascinating, somehow more beautiful than usual through her emphasis of her character’s destabilizing conflicts. Her performance in this movie is very strong. Somewhat aided by an ambiguous neighbor (Gabriel Byrne), Smilla investigates a connection between the child’s death and the misdeeds of a mining company.

The DVD edition of Smilla’s Sense of Snow includes an original theatrical trailer and a short feature on the making of the production.

• Actors: Ona Fletcher, Julia Ormond, Agga Olsen, Patrick Field, Matthew Marsh
• Directors: Bille August
• Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Studio: 20th Century Fox

Links to Smilla’s Sense of Snow at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

Original article: Smilla’s Sense of Snow – The Movie

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

The book was outstanding. The movie is excellent and fascinating!

Original article: Smilla’s Sense of Snow – video trailer

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

The second of Danish writer Hoeg’s novels to be translated into English (following Smilla’s Sense of Snow) is a very different book. It tells the story of a trio of misfits at an elite boarding school who discover they are guinea pigs in a sinister social experiment. The only thing it has in common with Smilla is that they both are extraordinary novels.

In Borderliners, Hoeg portrays the closed world of Biehl’s, a Danish private school also attended by children of the upper classes, in the early 1970s. The narrator, Peter, is a student at Biehl’s after spending all of his life in children’s homes and reform schools. He is a borderline case.

Peter is a bit psychotic, and wrestles with the demons of anxiety and despair that “the absolutely normal pupils” around him can hardly guess at. He is drawn to Katarina, whose parents both died in the past year. And he feels a need to protect August, who is severely disturbed after killing his abusive parents. Together these three form a little band of misfits. They are “borderliners” because they have academic and social problems.

The three grow closer, Peter falls for Katarina, and they begin struggling to break free of the strange experiments in social Darwinism being performed at the school.

Peter Hoeg masterfully tells the tale of this provincial world of childhood, limited and claustrophobic, that leaves its stamp in the years to come. And for the three youths with a marginal status in Danish society, Biehl’s offers the only chance – an opportunity to succeed and go to the University. One which they are not inclined to accept.

Borderliners is clearly an autobiographical novel. Peter, the narrator, is 14. Later we learn that he is adopted by a family named Hoeg. Despite a number of differences, the novel reminds me of another autobiographical novel by a Scandinavian author, namely Evil by Swedish author Jan Guillou. They both describe tough circumstances encountered in private schools – one in Denmark, the other in Sweden. Both are haunting, to some extent surreal, and quite disturbing.

Borderliners is a wonderful book, at times difficult to read, but very rewarding. It is not nearly as accessible as Smilla’s Sense of Snow, and some of the excursions into the nature of time are hard to follow. But it is a book of considerable beauty, and a book that lingers in your head after you have finished it. At times the book is very moving. An unforgettable story and a worthwhile read!

Links to Peter Hoeg’s books at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Original article: Borderliners, by Peter Hoeg

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

This is Peter Hoeg’s extremely remarkable debut novel. It was the wonderful Smilla’s Sense of Snow that turned Peter Hoeg into an international literary superstar, but this novel, written before Smilla’s Sense, may well be Peter Hoeg’s best novel so far. Really an outstanding and exceptional debut!

The History of Danish Dreams is a stunning literary accomplishment. It deserves to be much more widely known and read than it is. In this book, Peter Hoeg masterfully tells a tale that is a skillful blend of a solid dose of the rich magical realism of Garzia Márquez with the strange philosophical ruminations of Kundera. The book is a highly imaginative epic novel – a magnificent dreamlike tale – that provides a very intriguing and satiric look at Danish social history. It is a tough fable about the gifts and iniquities of progress, and a subtle social satire in the Ludvig Holberg tradition, only gradually do readers grasp what he is saying through his surreal stories.

In a fable-like manner it tells the strange history of Danish dreams – about the hopes and aspirations of the Danes and how they have contributed to the shaping of Denmark. Hoeg does this in a way that makes his Denmark captivating to non-Danish readers. The tale is told in seven related segments.

Hoeg brings to life the foolish 18th-century Count of Morkhoj, who one day decrees that on his estate time shall stand still forever; he gives us the Teander Rabow family, owners of a provincial newspaper whose power over their fellow townspeople is such that they print the news first and the events actually happen later, precisely at the time and in the fashion dictated by the influential journal; and many more strange characters and tales. And at the beginning and the end of the story he introduces us to the devious Carl Laurids, the millionaire rogue whose underhanded schemes and shady dealings so perfectly epitomize the financial world of the twentieth century.

The History of Danish Dreams is a demanding book that raises many questions: Is it history or dream? Can a history of dreams be written in chronological order? Who knows? It is an extremely well written and interestingly composed book, very provocative and stimulating, and one of the most innovative and intelligent novels I have ever encountered. A dark but brilliant fairy tale, highly recommended, one that will leave an impression!

Links to Peter Hoeg’s books at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

“wonderful in scope . . . crammed with Danish history, social realism, satire, magic realism, high romance, and sexual goings-on” (Newsday).

“Høeg writes prose that is as bitter, changeable, and deep-fathomed as poetry—prose that demands to be read aloud and savored.”–The New Yorker

“An exuberant, freewheeling fantasy.”–The Washington Post

“A very fine piece of imaginative writing.”–The New York Times Book Review

“A young man’s all-or-nothing book, as if Søren and Hans, those melancholy Danes, had teamed up and set sail, with Melville and García Márquez, to rewrite the universe.”–The Nation

“A uniquely talented writer . . . A multigenerational saga spanning four centuries of Danish history.”–Booklist

Original article: The History of Danish Dreams, by Peter Hoeg

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

Peter Høeg (born May 17, 1957) in Copenhagen, is one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary writers of fiction. He holds a Master of Arts degree in literature from the University of Copenhagen in 1984. He is divorced and has two daughters.

Before becoming a writer, he worked variously as a sailor, ballet dancer and actor. He is also a very good fencer and has done a lot of mountaineering. He has travelled a lot, and draws on his experiences in his writing. He also meditates, and has said that he meditates before starting his writing in the morning in order to become more focused and more compassionate. Also, he moves to remote spots and more or less isolates himself for shorter or longer periods of time – from one week to several months – in order to focus and concentrate properly while writing.

Peter Hoeg published his first novel, A History of Danish Dreams, in 1988 to very positive reviews. It was Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992) that earned Hoeg immediate and international literary celebrity. His books have been published in more than 30 other countries.

Peter Hoeg has a reputation for being hard to place in terms of literary style. His writing is extremely polished, and he uses a lot of time to write his books, taking the time to work and rework his drafts until they are just as he wants them. For instance, he worked on his first novel, Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede (Introduction to the Twentieth Century, 1988; translated as The History of Danish Dreams, 1995), for six years, rewriting one chapter twenty times and discarding hundreds of pages.

His works are stylistically very different from one another. They have been given widely differing labels, such as post-modern, gothic, magic-realist, just to mention a few. To the extent that there is a red thread, it probably is in terms of theme; Hoeg’s works often seem to deal with the consequences of the progress of civilization.

Peter Hoeg is seemingly very shy. And as he became a literary superstar after the publication of Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the attendant publicity and hype seems to have been a challenge to the author’s natural shyness. He only reluctantly gives interviews and finds it terrifying to have become a literary superstar whose address must be kept secret. On the rare occasions that he gives interviews, he stresses the importance of having a break, of contemplating time by stepping outside of it: “Bogen er jo et langsomt facnomen, at standse op og bruge to ar af sit liv pa at skrive en bog, det er jo at vaere meget, meget langsom i forhold til samfundets ovrige hastighed”. [The book is a slow phenomenon, to stop and spend two years of one's life on writing a book is to be very, very slow in relation to the speed of the rest of society].

Some good articles about Peter Hoeg:

Times: The return of ‘Miss Smilla’ author Peter Hoeg

Peter Hoeg or the sense of writing, by Hans Henrik Moller, in Scandinavian Studies, Wntr, 1997

Interview on some Russian Radio station, transcribed in English

Original article: Biography, Peter Hoeg

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.

Books

• Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede (1988) The History of Danish Dreams
• Fortællinger om natten (Short stories)(1990) Tales of the Night
• Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (1992) Smilla’s Sense of Snow
• De måske egnede (1993) Borderliners
• Kvinden og aben (1996) The Woman and The Ape
• Den stille pige (2006) The Quiet Girl
• Elefantpassernes børn (2010)

Prizes

• Weekendavisens litteraturpris (1988)
• The Glass Key Award from the Crime Writers of Scandinavia (1992) for Smilla’s Sense of Snow
• Kritikerprisen (1993)
• Herman Bangs Mindelegat (1993)
• De Gyldne Laurbær (1994)
• Silver Dagger (1994) for Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow

Original article: Bibliography, Peter Hoeg

©2013 Peter Hoeg. All Rights Reserved.