Customer Reviews

Tales of the Night (Harvill Panther S.)

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Before Peter Hoeg wrote his bestselling "Smilla's Sense of Snow," he crafted eight intriguing short stories in "Tales of the Night." It's a tangle of the heart and mind, art and culture, with a dark atmosphere and very good writing. Certainly it's far above the average short story collection.

In eight different parts of the world, eight different stories are unfolding on ht evening of March 19, 1929. A young Danish mathematician learns more about the conquest of Africa, when he finds himself on a train with Joseph Conrad and General von Lettow-Vorbeck. A ballet dancer loves and learns about reality. A judge finds himself falling madly in love with a man he's just jailed... for homosexual behavior. A small town is swept by a smallpox epidemic. And through these dark stories run a flurry of artists, students, scientists, Nazis and lovers.

Peter Hoeg is a writer for people who like their books deep and intense. There isn't a light or fluffy moment in the whole book. In a way, "Tales of the Night" is all about love. We see love in all its different forms -- pain, learning, redemption and fear. While it isn't obvious at first, the depths of Hoeg's writing becomes clearer on the second or third time around.

Hoeg's writing is beautiful -- very thick and slow, and almost dreamlike. It's not something to be read quickly. He weaves in a lot of symbolism and philosophy, without making them "message stories." And at the same time, since the book is set in 1929, he includes some of the political rumblings that came before war.

The characters of Hoeg's stories are all loners. Whether they're travellers, lovers, or artists, they all seem to be enclosed in little private bubbles. Not to mention a bit repressed and wrapped up in their own thoughts. Some of them are the sort of people you would despise in real life, but he gives them a sense of humanity and depth.

Peter Hoeg was still a newbie writer when he penned "Tales of the Night," but his writing already had polish and depth. Beautiful, dark and sad.

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.

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.

Peter Høeg's Tales Of The Night, translated by Barbara Haveland, is not a difficult book to read because of the nature of the tales, but because of the dense and clunky style his prose wields. I have not read his much lauded novel Smilla's Sense Of Snow, published in 1992, two years after this book was released in Denmark, and only got this acclaimed book because of its premise being all the eight tales are set on a single night- March 19th, 1929. Well, that premise is a bit strained, as each tale, merely has, at best, a tangential relation to that particular night, as there is no particular significance to that date historically, nor in the unfolding of the tales. Therefore it is mere gimmickry. Each tale is too long, the unwinding of the dramatic center is too long in coming, and there is far too heavy a reliance on clichés and banalities for the stories, or the book, to succeed....Overall, Peter Høeg shows that he has no real idea of what constitutes a good short story. His tales read like bad European cinema from the 1970s- dull, slow-paced, and pretentious, with too much conscious symbolism and name-dropping. His prose is turgid and leaden (they are not synonyms!), but perhaps he could be a good novelist if his prose thins out with length. Sermonizing and morality plays seem to go over far better on the Continent than in the Colonies, but bad is bad. Sometimes things are not poetic, and it really is that cut and dried. If Høeg knew that his tales might have had a life. Instead they are as dead as that night he could never impart.

these stories often show great promise and are the work of a formidable intellect, but something's off somehow. hoeg paints repressed life in denmark with great skill, and the final story, about a telescope maker, is wonderfully unreal.