Headline, April30, 2013

'''THE SINISTER WORLD OF 

-DANISH- AUTHOR PETER HOEG'''

The nimbus of glamour around any author never hurts. Peter Hoeg was born in Denmark in 1957. A former sailor, athlete, actor, and ballet dancer, he has traveled all over the world but takes pride in nomadic elusiveness.

Smilla's Sense of Snow, Peter Hoeg's high brow thriller with the arrestingly clumsy title, became such an unexpected clothbound hit that the ad budget for later paperback edition included money for side-of-the-broadsides saying ''THINK SNOW.''

Smilla developed into the sort of phenomenon people don't want to be left out of, the kind that, after all the years buzz, leaves them susceptible to two-word imperatives. Its publishers had tried not so much to convince the readers that they should buy it as condition them into making the purchase. The Danish genius's follow up novel, Borderliners, encountered a similar success.

Once more Hoeg is dealing with the sadistic treatment of children incidental to adult designs. Smilla Jaspersen, a solemn little fireplug from Greenland, spent her book bravely investigating a suspicion that some sinister corporate force lay behind the ''fall'' of Isaiah. her neighbor's child, from a Copenhagen rooftop. This time, in Bordeliners, the story comes first first-person from a narrator telling how twenty years earlier he survived the experimental mind games of a Danish private school, Biehl's Academy.

Things are certainly pretty awful at the school: shrinks, two way mirrors, loudspeakers that can hear and enough corporal punishment. Biehl, the headmaster, ''had been hitting children regularly for forty years''. Makes you think you are in some developing world rather than Scandinavia. The son of the deputy head, a pupil named Axel fredhoj, has even tried, because of something he discovered, to cut out his own tongue.

For all its thematic grandiosity, Borderliners is a less ambitious novel than Smilla, a less ''written'' book too, with fewer twists and pleasures in its prose. In fact, one could almost believe that it had been composed before Smilla instead of since, and that the first book's slam-bang were meant to compensate for Borderliners abstraction, instead of vice-versa.  

But the novels shared preoccupation with avenging abused children proves Hoeg an obsessive, sometimes a fine thing for a writer to be and probably the quality that creates the muffled, sealed feeling of his books, their eerie quiet, even when fists fly and windows break.

These hermetic novels, powerful even flawed, would seem to result from the author's willingness to put himself entirely inside them, like a magician crawling into a safe. He has taken Flaubert's famous statement of imaginative empathy   -I am Madam Bovary- one step further.

Borderliners, is not according to its publishers, autobiographical, but its narrator, Peter, has been given the last name of Hoeg.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

Peter Hoeg is a great master at plumbing the Heart of Darkness!

Respectful dedication to all the Students and Professors of Denmark. See you all on !WOW! And thanks for your reviews.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless