SOURCE: Binding, Paul. “Family Failings.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4842 (19 January 1996): 26.

In the following review, Binding discusses the narrator of The History of Danish Dreams and the familial bonds that are prevalent throughout the novel.

Only on the very last page of Peter Høeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (which was originally published in 1988), do readers learn the identity of the “I” who has periodically made authorial intrusions into the narrative—explaining the difficulties of assembling material, pointing out the general significance of the particular people and events. This “I” is Mads, the descendant of every person we have significantly engaged with in this long, many-stranded account of the twentieth century in Denmark. The disclosure brings about in us an immediate revaluation of the histories we have been following; and we realize that what we have received as objective pictures have a subjective resonance that we...