SOURCE: "Strangers in Paradise," in The New Republic, Vol. 212, No. 4185, April 3, 1995, pp. 39-41.

In the following review of Borderliners, Mousavizadeh discusses the figure of the outsider in Høeg's works.

"With the knife of light they would scrape the darkness clean," observes the young narrator of Borderliners, who languishes in the private boarding school that is the setting for Peter Høeg's new novel. Barely a teenager, barely sane, he speaks of the zealotry of his superiors, of the cruelty of best intentions, with the weariness of an old man. Høeg's novel is the story of three children whose shattered lives merge at the center of an educational experiment that seeks to socialize the abandoned and the most alone—the story of the real consequences of an unimpeachably enlightened social policy. But the cause of these children is a lost cause. They want no part of a...