SOURCE: "From a Sense of Snow to a Tussle with Time," in The New York Times, November 29, 1994, p. C19.

Kakutani is a regular reviewer for The New York Times. In the following review of Borderliners, she assesses the novel as "a willfully elliptical narrative that often tries the reader's patience."

Like Peter Hoeg's last novel, the best-selling Smilla's Sense of Snow, Borderliners is one of those books that functions on two levels. Smilla was both a thriller and a philosophical meditation on the human condition; Borderliners is both a harrowing tale of an orphan's ordeals within the Danish child-care system and a philosophical meditation on the nature of time.

The biggest difference between the two novels—and it is a huge one—has to do with language and tone. Whereas Smilla boasted a marvelously eccentric narrator, who related her story in wry, impatient prose, Borderliners features an evasive...