HISTORY OF DANISH DREAMS, THE by Peter Hoeg - FIRST EDITION BOOK

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