SOURCE: "Old Trunk," in Time, Vol. 146, No. 19, November 6, 1995, p. 84.

In the following review, Skow offers a mixed assessment of The History of Danish Dreams, noting that the novel contains elements of magic realism as well as satire.

One of the strong subsurface themes of Smilla's Sense of Snow, the fine 1993 thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish novelist then new to America, was a slyly expressed contempt for what the author saw as his country's bourgeois self-satisfaction. This much relished contempt and cheerfully malign slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams, which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles to a halt after several dozen pages, begins again with new characters and repeats this throat clearing until well...