SOURCE: "Time Never Stops," in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 6, 1994, p. 3, 11.

In the following review of Borderliners, Eder describes the novel as "more a philosophic allegory than a story" in which the most evil force is time itself.

Ostensibly, the villain of Peter Hoeg's novel about the rebellion of three tormented children at a progressive Danish boarding school is the tyrannically self-righteous headmaster. Borderliners, though, is more a philosophic allegory than a story; and its real villain is linear time—time, that is, as an inflexible progress that the powerful misuse to constrain the circular talents and zigzag impulses of human nature.

Hoeg's second book to be translated into English makes an austere contrast to his Smilla's Sense of Snow, a novel of suspense about a turbulent Greenland woman who investigates the death of a child and comes up against a vast political-economic-scientific conspiracy. Smilla offered...