SOURCE: "Northern Exposure," in The New York Times, October 22, 1995, p. 26.

Morley is a British novelist, translator, and critic. In the following positive review of The History of Danish Dreams, he compares Høeg's writing to that of such writers as Milan Kundera, Selma Lagerlof, and Hans Christian Andersen.

If books could be assigned geometrical shapes (an idea that Smilla, the heroine of Smilla's Sense of Snow, with her feeling not only for snow but for higher mathematics, would surely have endorsed), then Peter Hoeg's new novel, actually his first, might be viewed as a pyramid. The History of Danish Dreams has a tripartite structure. Part 1, the base, establishes the story of four Danish families over almost exactly four centuries, from 1520 to 1918. The middle is inhabited by two families, descendants of those on whose shoulders they are standing. The already sharply attenuated shape of the pyramid reflects the much...