SOURCE: Malin, Irving. Review of The History of Danish Dreams, by Peter Høeg. Review of Contemporary Fiction 16, no. 2 (summer 1996): 159–60.

In the following review, Malin discusses time, the use of dreams, and the concept of history in The History of Danish Dreams.

I admire this intriguing novel. [The History of Danish Dreams] is a challenging text because it apparently questions the very notion of its form. If we look closely at the title we are startled by the concepts of “history” and “dreams.” Some of the questions the title suggests are the following: Is “history”—or the past—a “dream”? How can one write a “history of dreams” in chronological order? Is the historian dreaming the Danish dreams? The text begins with a foreword written by a narrator, a historian who claims that he made his text as “simple” as he could. He then mentions two mysterious, cryptic...