SOURCE: "Beauty, Truth and the Danish Way" in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, December, 24, 1995, pp. 3, 8.

Shepard is an American educator, novelist, and critic. In the following review of The History of Danish Dreams, he discusses Høeg's treatment of the self-deluding "dreams," or myths, present in both Danish and Western culture and how they contribute to human suffering.

One of the many good things that happens to an author when his third book is acclaimed far and wide is that his first and second books receive renewed attention. (This means that whenever one of our books disappears, we console ourselves with the belief that once we publish our own All the Pretty Horses, everything we previously wrote will be appreciated again.)

The History of Danish Dreams, Peter Hoeg's first novel, follows his second, Borderliners, into English translation, which followed his third, the universally admired Smilla's Sense of...