Fans of lucid, thought-provoking writing will enjoy Peter Hoeg's offering, Tales of the Night.

As in his previous writing, Hoeg's Tales are full of outsiders, people who have learnt that "it may be necessary to stand on the outside if one is to see things clearly." Clearly, Hoeg has done some standing on the outside himself, and in Tales of the Night he shares some of what he has learned.

"The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning." Thus, the protagonist of this short story collection's last entry, "Reflection of a Young Man in Balance," sums up what he has come to learn about love, and life in general. However, these could also be the words of almost any character in any of the other tales told here: Admittedly or unadmittedly, they are searching for something, for a defining point or experience in life, and all of them see their lives profoundly unbalanced by that experience.

Taking "love and its conditions on the night of March 19, 1929" as his point of reference and as a link between the otherwise unconnected eight stories, Peter Hoeg takes his readers from Denmark around the world to Paris, Lisbon and Central Africa. In a language and in settings somewhere between Dinesen (the obvious comparison), Conrad, Hemingway, Wilde and Poe, the author of "Smilla's Sense of Snow" takes a look at the human condition, society in the first decades of the 20th century, and the dichotomy of science and sentiment, experience and emotion, logic and love.

In "Journey into a Dark Heart," a historic train ride in Central Africa turns into a life-changing adventure for a young, disheartened mathematician, with travel companions such as German war hero General von Lettow-Vorbeck, traveling writer Joseph Korzeniowski (a/k/a Joseph Conrad, whose "Heart of Darkness" provides the obvious inspiration for more than just the story's title) and an African servant girl with her own surprise in store for the three men.

"Hommage a Bournonville" finds a young Danish ballet dancer on a tiny boat in Lisbon's harbor, telling the story of his lost love to a dervish of Turkish origin cast together with him by fate.

In "The Verdict on the Right Honorable Ignatio Landstad Rasker, Lord Chief Justice," a father chooses the occasion of his son's marriage to pass on the story how his own father, a renowned jurist and civil servant, faced up to the demons he had suppressed for most of his life, and which his family thereafter promptly continued to suppress.

"An Experiment on the Constancy of Love" juxtaposes a young woman of means and great beauty, an aspiring scientist with a sheer endless disdain for life, and the man who becomes her suitor from their first childhood meeting on and follows her from Paris to Denmark and back to Paris, until their ambitions and sentiments collide head-on in a fatal experiment she has devised.

"Portrait of the Avant-Garde" takes a successful, ambitious painter with ties to the rising Nazis to a nightly boat trip into self-discovery off a remote Danish island.

"Pity for the Children of Vaden Town" is the story of a city's self-elected utter isolation, and of the pied piper who has come to the town children's rescue - with abounding reminiscences to the Grimm Brothers, Robert Browning, Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll.

In "Story of a Marriage," a writer discovers that the public image of perfection is often nothing more than that: an image.

And last but not least, in "Reflection of a Young Man in Balance," a young scientist discovers the destructively revealing power of a perfect mirror.

"Tales of the Night" was written and appeared in Denmark in 1990, as Hoeg's second book (after 1988's "The History of Danish Dreams" and two years before "Smilla's Sense of Snow"), but was published in the U.S. only after the success of his story about the Inuit exile from Copenhagen hell-bent on solving the mystery of the death of a little boy, her only friend. In tone and theme, the two books could not be any more different; yet, like Smilla, Hoeg's protagonists in these tales are loners; outsiders of society, and ultimately, most of them are comfortable in that role and seek solitude rather than social acclaim and popularity. "I learned that it may be necessary to stand on the outside of one is to see things clearly," the narrator of "Hommage a Bournonville" tells his Muslim companion, and he could be speaking for many of them. So, while social norms and conventions are an important backdrop for the experiences made by Hoeg's characters, ultimately it is one person in particular, often a loner like themselves, who provides them with the experience that will change the course of the entire rest of their lives.

Peter Hoeg tells his protagonists' stories with as much intelligence as humility, an occasional sense of humor; and most of all, with great empathy, undying even in their most somber moments. Not all of these tales are immediately uplifting (and Hoeg's successor novels continue to explore the dark side of the human existence); but they provide ample food for thought and are not to be missed.

Peter Hoeg is one of the greatest writers of these years. His simple and fluent language is the ideal medium of a deep, passionate and intelligent storytelling. All the tales of this books take place the 19th March 1929 and tell of love in several different ways, some unbelievable but true as well. And truth is another thing Hoeg presents in its ambiguous and fearful points of view. There is a constant tension between magic and pragmatism, ideal and real, in his pages; a hard and thought provoking research. The tales of Bourneville, Ignatio Rasker and of the poor egocentric painter Simon Bering are masterpieces; wonderfully written, their characters have only one thing in common: a great humanity, in the most complete sense of the word. The story of Vaden By recalls, in its last pages, a bitter sweet fable of Andersen; we see the Great Monsieur Andress as a new Magic Flute player. As a perfect ending, the last dreamy,vaguely Borges-like tale leaves us with the idea that Hoeg's (and our) search has not alredy ended and probably will never.

I didn't really like Smilla either so I am not sure why I even read this book. The jacket hails it as "gripping" and "disturbing", but I found myself wondering from page to page why Hoeg was taking himself so very seriously with his hit and miss philosophical discussions of time. I went through periods of thinking that he was hitting on something very profound, but in the end felt myself wading in pretty shallow waters. Not a total waste of time, however - some interesting characters and a pretty addictive plot. I was just put off by his rambling discussions of a topic that he should have either put a LOT more thought into, or left out completely

It's difficult for me to think of this book separately from Hoeg's first, _A History of Danish Dreams_, which reads like a fever-dream-version of _Borderliners_. Both are obsessed with the passage (or seeming failure to pass) of time, and with certain elements of pagan and Lutheran symbolism. Both are populated by characters surviving in the midst of nearly Kafkaesque madness by distancing themselves from the world and the people in it. The two books feed one another: I think that, if it's feasible, you should read the older book first.

_Borderliners_ is more polished than either _Smilla..._ or _...History..._, but it grows rough toward the end, as Hoeg draws closer to the real subject of the story. Even as the prose grows awkward, though, and even as the narrative becomes more detached as it approaches the present, those facts somehow make it even more effective.

This is not an easy book to read, emotionally, nor is it a simple book to understand. It can be construed as an indictment of "special education" or progressivism, but it should not be: It's simply the story that it is, and shouldn't be approached with any preconceptions.

The writing of the great Danish novelist Peter Høeg is beyond genre classification, although this novel and Smilla's Sense Of Snow could best be described as a cross between an Ingmar Bergman screenplay and a Stephen King novel. Borderliners is a dark, semiautobiographical novel about Peter, a 13-year-old boy attending a boarding school for troubled students in Copenhagen. In a dreary atmosphere of hopelessness, strictly enforced regulations and corporal punishments, Peter befriends two very opposite fellow students: the older, sophisticated loner Katarina and a timid little boy named August. Something strange is going on, but Peter can't figure it out. Why would a school that prides itself on order accept a student like August - a schizophrenic who murdered his parents after suffering years of their abuse? "He is chaos." Katarina says. Peter soon uncovers a terrifying, Orwellian experiment in behavior modification being run by school administrators. And we Americans thought our schools were bad for stoning our kids out on drugs like Ritalin! Peter Høeg's book is a must-read for anyone who likes great literature. His prose is dark and lushly poetic. You will never forget Borderliners!

Peter Hoeg translates so well into English, but what must the original Danish be like! What a wonderful feast of language, exotic and strange characters, and locations. This is a very beautiful , heartwrenching exploration of the place of the misfit,the intelligent and sensitive outsider who somehow needs to reconcile her Greenlandic upbringing with a scientific,20th century northern European heritage and existence.Greenlanders in Denmark, like Aboriginals in Australia, are susceptible to alchohol and welfare dependency."Civilization" has ruined them by destroying their selfrespect and robbing them of ther language and skills. Smilla fights herself (she trusts nobody, and rightly so}, and she fights the system. The second half of the book becomes more of an action thriller and lacks the abstraction, mathematics and philosophy which made the first section absolutely seductive to me.However an excellent book, worth reading and re-reading.

The snow...the ice...the cold...all are wonderfully described in this beautifully written novel. I bought this book in the summertime, but knowing it's winter Danish setting wisely held off from reading it till the winter -- reading this in summer heat just wouldn't be right!

At its most basic, this is a great whodunnit. Smilla, with her Greenlander ability to "read" tracks and forms in the snow (hence the title), knows that her little boy neighbour did not simply trip and fall from the snow-topped roof of their building...The tracks tell Smilla something more sinister, and she is determined to get to the root of it.

Smilla herself is a wonderful character, sometimes appearing sympathetic and warm, other times cold and distant. In other words, she is entirely convincing.

READ THIS BOOK! It had me on the edge of my seat and was a thrilling page turner.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow is a fascinating book. It's quite unjust that on Amazon at least, it seems barely known, while books of much lesser ambition and accomplishment are lauded.

The book is actually hard to describe. In plot terms: the heroine, a prickly loner, is drawn into a plot by a child's death. Sensing wrongdoing, she battles police, bureaucracy and sinister conspiracies to get to the truth, helped by a misfit band of characters, all while falling in love against her will with her main collaborator - or is he the enemy?

In the hands of most authors, this would just be another of the thousands of wannabe thrillers published each year. Peter Hoeg, with the setting, the character, and the originality of his writing, makes Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow something quite different.

The book is set in cold, cold climates, ranging from urban Copenhagen to the fjords & glaciers of Smilla's homeland of Greenland, to the seas off west Greenland that terrify even the hardest sailors - the 'Sea of Fog' and the 'Iceberg Cemetery'.

Smilla Jaspersen, of unusual parentage - her father a Danish medical specialist, her mother a Greenlandic traditional hunter - is a scientist, rationalist, mathematician and expert on snow and ice in all its forms. After her mother disappears on a hunting trip the child Smilla is taken to Denmark by her father - to a foreign land of boarding schools where no-one speaks her language, and people look down on the dark, uncouth Greenlanders.

As much as a thriller this is also a story of displacement and dispossession, of how irrevocably your homeland can shape you and remain in your heart. The well-meaning Danes colonise Greenland with the usual devastating effects on the native inhabitants - Smilla's own brother, the clan's supreme hunter, is reduced to sweeping docks and then suicide.

Smilla herself is educated and urbane enough to survive city life - she dresses elegantly, reads Euclid, understands bureaucracy. But the subversive misfit of her childhood is never far from the surface and she's a genuine rebel, in a way that the savvy, wisecracking heroines of US/UK stories somehow never are.

The language, while lyrically translated, is very unlike anything that would be written in native English, it's crammed indiscriminately with mundane details, philosphical musings, and a few wonderful insights. It's not for lightweight easy-reading fans - neither is the final revelation of the 'mystery' which, although implausibly stupid, somehow doesn't detract too much from the overall spell of the book. If you're bored with the standard murder mystery/thriller books, please - find and read this one.

When I was reading this book, I was thinking "will this ever end?". I am glad I persevered with it. More than six months after I finished it, characters are popping back into my head and making me smile. I think that is the highest recommendation that you can give a novel. The way all the threads of the story were interconnected and in particular how they were resolved at the end was very satisfying. But, people who enjoyed 'Smilla's Sense Of Snow' may find that 'magic realism' is not the genre for them. In fact, the two books are so unalike that they don't even feel like were written by the same author. And that I think says something about Peter Hoeg's ability.

Peter Hoeg speaks out loudly of what others are afraid to imagine:children have never been the little,boring angels we want them to be.But he does it in such an enchanting,powerful and imagination-capturing way that the irritating for some thought becomes a ticket to Dreamland-not only Danish but of all places and time.His book is denying all cliches presenting us with characters we 've never met before in literature , making us live and breath with them and identify with them (whether we like it or not),envying the complexity of their personalities and the dreamlike quality of their lives. Hoeg can create atmosphere as well as characters,being at the same time a sarcastic commentator of society and politics,but the latter serves also the purpose of making the fantasy-like world of his heroes more believable than anything else. It;s good to see the field of human dreams and especially that of children treated just as it deserves-no false sentiment,no out of place sarcasm. And we ,the <>,are grateful to him for his book.

This book is a stunning literary accomplishment that should be much more widely known than it is. Peter Hoeg weaves this tale in a way that marries the magical realism of García Márquez with philosophical ruminations reminiscent of Kundera.

This is the history of Danish dreams in the sense of hopes, of aspirations: of discussing what Danes of different classes and generations have wanted in the past two hundred years, and how these aspirations contributed to building the Danish society of today. Hoeg achieves a rare and seemingly contradictory feat: he criticizes a great many aspects of his country and its society, yet does so in a way that makes his Denmark captivating to non-Danish readers. Hoeg tells his story in a series of seven segments which relate to each other, through the lives of a cast of recurring characters and their children and grandchildren, paradigmatic of Denmark's different social classes. 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. In one segment, Hoeg includes a recurring device in which several of the most influential figures of 19th-century Denmark --- a business tycoon, an architect, a Socialist rabble-rouser --- are secretly all siblings who have conspired to obscure their shared past as the sons of a small-time crook and a circus performer. And at the beginning and 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 wisdom in Hoeg's book is not exclusive to Denmark: he speaks of the nature of "the twentieth century, where things change so rapidly that parents' experiences are totally and hopelessly outdated by the time their children have need of them." This book works on two levels, both as an entertaining family saga of men and women in their times, and as an embroidered parable of the forces behind national conscience. This is a dreamy read that will please anyone who's looking for unusual philosophical storytelling and who welcomes a book that fully engages one's mind.

Though this book is about a woman and her relationship with an ape, the title doesn't quite fit.

The novel is set mostly in London. As an American living in London, I really identified with the author's view of 'my' city as expressed through his two non-Londoner protagonists, a Danish woman and an ape (I won't spoil it by telling you where he's from).

The book itself is pacy and surprising, if you ignore kind of a slow start. An original piece of work and a pleasure to read. If you didn't like the ending to Smilla's Sense of Snow you will probably find the ending of this a fair bit less annoying, but still a little contrived.

All the other reviewers of this book should realize that they were reading the words of translator Tiina Nunnally, not Peter Hoeg. He wrote it in Danish. The translation won an award from the American Translators Association for the best translation of the previous two years.

Hoeg's book, however, left a lot to be desired. I read it both in Danish and in English, and it's a shame that Tiina Nunnally wasn't allowed to fix all the holes in the plot. The first third was extremely interesting, but as soon as Smilla got on the ship for Greenland, the plot started to fall apart. And the finale! You'd have to research the annals of 20s pulp science fiction for a more unbelievable ending. I think Hoeg just got tired and gave up trying in the last half of the book. He should have stayed in Copenhagen.

Smilla was not a believable female character for me either. But she was still a lot better than Julia Ormond's movie version, who spent most of her screen time in endless closeups of her in various fashionable outfits (and non-PC ivory jewelry) that the book's Smilla wouldn't have been caught dead in. Movie rating: Turkey.

If you liked this book, don't bother with his other ones; this one is by far his best effort to date.

As a writer, I'm interested in style and mood as well as character and plot. "Smilla" is awesome on all counts - a book I would have given anything to write. I've read it twice, which I never do with other mysteries, and seen the movie, which I also liked. The identification between Smilla, torn from her Greenlander roots as a child and left alienated and wounded, and the little boy, whose death she won't allow to be casually dismissed, is moving and satisfying. The digressions about math, ice, and Greenland are half of what makes the book literature instead of genre fiction. The other half is the sensational writing style, bleak,unsentimental, complex and brave like Smilla. True, there are a few stumbles here and there, and especially at the end, but only because the book is so ambitious. The impression I have is of a serious novelist who sets out to write a best-seller and can't help raising all the tired old elements of the genre to new heights. Mr. Hoeg's other books are fascinating but less accessible because they are more experimental. I wonder if he will "descend" to popular fiction again

This book doesn't have a genre. It's just literature, and it's good literature. Sometimes it seems to be the general opinion that if a book is entertaining it cannot possibly be a work of art. "Smilla's Sense Of Snow" is another book that proves it to be wrong.

The most surprising thing about the book is its genuine feeling, its incredibly surreal and yet exquisitely natural flow. Nowadays most authors feel the need to set a fast pace so that the reader doesn't get bored. And, indeed, people have learned to hurry. "Smilla's Sense Of Snow", however, allows one to look around, actually experience things, not just rush through them. The book seems strangely dreamlike, reading it is a lot like moving through water - you are awed by the alternate world that can be found underwater, and you cannot move swiftly, and after some time you learn to understand the water and appreciate the beauty of simply being.

When it comes to women, literature is full of clichés. Peter Hoeg's Smilla is certainly not one of them; she is original to say the least. Still, the essence of woman is there. One cannot help but wonder at the way a man has been able to create a woman who's very unlike most women in literature (or life, indeed) so perfectly that she doesn't need to be feminine to convince the reader she is one, even when the reader happens to be female.

"Smilla's Sense Of Snow" is a fascinating book. Books such as this one are rare nowadays.

This book is based on quite an interesting idea, and it would bring that across had it not been so badly written. For a fable it is trying to be too realistic, for a story it isn't trying to be realistic enough. I had quite a hard time believing several crucial points in the story, mostly due to the fact that Hoeg is telling me everything, never showing me anything so he can make me belive what I read. When I finally accepted (not believed, accepted) that Madalene was an alcoholic, I was led to believe that she could fight it (right after an almost delirium) in just a couple of days...sure. I also had a hard time believing her strange relationship with Adam, and I guess weird relationships do exist, but I was mostly annoyed by the fact that I should also believe that so many couples have never actually seen eachother naked, as in the end of the book everyone is in shock about the existence of the other apes. Some have even been able to make kids and not let their husband or wife notice that they were hairy all over. Quite an accomplishment I would say. I love a good plot, I love interesting ideas, like this one was, especially as they defend a principle, contain a moral theory, but I would like it to be brought across with some level of realism. Make me believe it could've happened. And I'm willing to believe in superintelligent apes. Even that you can fall in love with them. That was actually the most believable part, Madalene's love for Erasmus. Not enough for me to forget about the rest though.

Mr. Hoeg did it again: give us a dream wrapped into hard-hitting reality. After "Smilla" and "The Borderliners", we now have a third great novel from this author, and I want to thank him for it. While it is similar to "The Planet of the Apes" by Pierre Boulle, it is taken to a new, metaphysic dimension. It took years for "Smilla" to "catch on"; I hope this book will fare better

this book does indeed touch somewhere deep inside. the novel is not interested in realitiy, in the stiching together of plot. Hoeg presents us with a story that moves between paralells and allows us to dream and purge at the same time. he allows humour and eroticism to take the place of plot and story. i like madeline and her test tube and samson and the dog. they all represent some deep flaw in our humanness. this book provoked and moved. and turned me on.