Categories: uncategorized
Date: 20 June 2006 11:32:59
It's winter here, and school holidays, and after a trip to the bookshop last week we've both been reading nearly every night. We've even got a wood fire, which when we light it makes for even better reading - even if only because our puppy sleeps more when it's burning.
I've picked up Tales of the Night by Peter Høeg. I read one of his books earlier this year, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, and it impressed me enough to search out another book by this Dane. It is a volume of short stories about love. It's good, but not as compelling as Miss Smilla, and I found it slightly dissappointing - although this is an observation I often make about short stories.
The eight pieces are not love stories; this is not a romantic book. The fact that I was partly expecting something romantic may have led to my dissappointment, but although not warm or fuzzy the stories are good nonetheless. They detail different facets of love, from the hopeless to violent to obsessed to absurd. The characters are interesting, complicated and well-drawn, and the insights into the Danish and European mind and culture is intriguing. Some of the ideas were strong enough to make me tell people I met this week about them - always a sign that a book is having an impact. Here's a quote:
In other seasons they adorned Paris. By their parents' sides they made an endless succession of entrances into rooms filled with gaily dressed guests, among whom the men, even when they were twenty years older than the girls, gazed at them as if they could not believe their eyes, then had to press their fevered brows against cool doorframes and remind themselves of the laws against such things and of the fact that they were family men and that there was nothing to be done about it because, faced with women - or even, as here, with little girls - who act as if life is nothing but one long, uplifting wave of creme Chantilly, men have always been seized by an enfeebled, defenceless, impotent awareness of being marsh frogs.