Rating: Summary: BRILLIANT! Review: It's fantastic how he manage to write between the lines without a frustrating effect by doing so. This book is a must read for everyone!
Rating: Summary: An excellent follow-up to Smilla! Review: 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!
Rating: Summary: Safer than LSD, this mind-trip is a MUST READ Review: This fresh and compelling new novel by Peter Hoeg the author of the dark yet captivating "Smilla's Sense of Snow" is like a journey into Einstein's brain - a cruise into the inner reaches of time. In fact, so much of the book is about time, that if I'm ever bed ridden or find myself with nothing better to do,I'm going to go through this book and highlight the word TIME each time it shows up, and I'm quite certain it will be there at least one thousand times. So I've established that there is some tedium and redundancy in this novel. However, time is the critical element in the 'experiment' that pushes the borderline students (two orphans and one psychotic boy who recently murdered his parents after years of abuse) over the edge while they are supposed to be assimilating themselves into an elite private school. As resourceful and unwilling to submit to government/institutional dictates as 'Smilla' was, this story (which seems to be autobiographical down to the protagonist first name - Peter) kept me on pins and needles until the very end and left me clambering for more. Dark, disturbing yet hopeful too, this book will leave you looking at everything differently . . . in TIME.
Rating: Summary: Time as a device Review: This is an insightful book. If you're like me, Peter Hoeg's writing style can leave you a little frustrated; leaving so many thoughts half completed, skipping and jumping as he does between seemingly unconnected images, thoughts, facts and impressions. Apart from being just a literary devise however, this method is perhaps attributable also to the difficultly of the story's content for the author. Maybe he can only allude to the story rather than tell it because of the damage that he has seen and in fact been complicit in. Whatever the reason, it falls away once the author becomes more comfortable with the truth and uncovers wisdom in his childhood reflections. Wisdom which flows with wonderful simplicity and as a natural conclusion from his experience and adult research. I was particulalry impressed with Peter Hoeg's aptitude for philosophical commentary, and found this to be an unexpected and unique gift of his writing.
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