The History of Danish Dreams

Rating:
Summary: Imaginative funny dreamlike tour of the twentieth century
Review: When I finished this book, I suddenly realised that it was 3AM, and I had been reading solidly for about 6 hours. That's how good this book is. Characters like Amalie are so lifelike, that you can love them on one page and hate them on the next, without seeing any contradiction in their characters. The book starts off in the realms of fantastic myth and dream, but as the 20th century progresses, history creeps in and memories become more reliable. The dreams of the title are the "memes" (the cultural equivalent of genes) of the characters, passed on from generation to generation,hybridised and mutated. They are also the symbolic visions of sleep. One reviewer said that the characters are "too heavily laden with symbolic baggage". I think this misses the point. Hoeg is saying that everyone's personality is shaped by the dreams or memes of those who have come before, through family, religion and society. The symbols aren't baggage, Hoeg has seen through the twentieth century and found the underlying myth.

Rating:
Summary: A little hard going, but worth the effort.
Review: 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.