2022 has been a year of surprises in reading for me, and this is the second time a book this year has left me windswept and delighted, if a bit bemused.

A grand oversimplification would be to summarize 'The History of Danish Dreams' as a Danish 'One Hundred Years of Solitude,' though in terms of marketing I could see why that would be done. Like 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' this is a multi-generational family saga that parallels, in this case, the evolution of 'The Danish Dream' as presented by author Peter Høeg, and it does so through the deft employment of magical realism.

Does that mean that having read one, one has no need to read the other? I think that would be an insult to both. Granted, I've not read 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', though I have enough proximal knowledge to speak on it to this degree. From my understanding, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is an exploration of nearly the exact same things as 'A History of Danish Dreams': repetition, class, trauma, sex, and how all of these things intertwine. In that sense, 'A History of Danish Dreams' is the Danish 'One Hundred Years of Solitude.' Needless to say, however, Argentina and Denmark's unique histories would inevitably lead to different explorations of these themes. And the places where they intersect might be an interesting place to start when examining 'human truth' in fiction.

All of this to say: Høeg very patently modeled his project off of Gabriel García Márquez's work, but I don't think that necessarily cheapens it, and if anything, gives the people more of what they so clearly want given the near universal acclaim 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' enjoys.

As far as I'm concerned, now having read 'A History of Danish Dreams', I'm more inclined to read 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' than I was before because I liked this so much.

So, enough of the (necessary)'discourse'; let's get to the novel.

This is an incredibly dense 400 page novel. Not dense in language (Høeg's style is generally bouncy and breezy), but in ideas; Høeg manages to squeeze about a million different things onto a single page, and yet I never felt bogged down by it--just surprised every time I realized that after so much action I'd only gotten through several hundred words. And the asides! Høeg clearly never met an aside he didn't like. In this way, the style isn't unlike Salman Rushdie's -- specifically in 'Midnight's Children.'

One of the 'love it or hate it' elements to 'A History of Danish Dreams' is, as the name perhaps suggests, its dreaminess. 'Truth' in this novel is established early on as subjective, and our first person narrator (whose identity remains unknown to us until the final pages) reminds us of this from time to time:

In these streets animal tamers presented creatures from Noah's arc: giraffes, hippopotamuses, elephants [...] all of these trained to make obscene gestures and to copulate with one another before the very eyes of the spectators. Now here I have to step in to say that I have had a hard time recognizing Rudkøbing, that respectable provincial town, in this, a description from the annals of the Danish Evangelical Mission. Nevertheless, that is what the faithful remember having seen. (p.83)

Similarly, the novel concerns itself with the push and pull between perception and reality of an individual's experience.

It was not long after this that Anna started to clean. This is a historical fact and, no matter what I do, history is history. [...] but I do have to say, beware of this "not long after" because it reminds me that time -- while establishing a context in an account such as this-- seems so unreliable [...] when this happened it was viewed in a much different light -- not least by Anna, who would have maintained that she had always had this need for order. And so it is Maria's, her daughter's, time that we relate to.(p.154)

Again, we see this in how Ramses's father views himself as the century's most infamous criminal, while Ramses sees him as a fraud who takes the credit for other people's crimes to build this fake mythos for himself.

Rinse, repeat.

I really appreciated this aspect of the novel because it sucessfully captures the idea of memories being very like dreams in the sense that they so easily slip through our fingers and are colored more by emotion than factual truth the farther we move away from them.

This is also a great opportunity to bring up magical realism. The closer to the present (1989) we get, the less of it there is, so that while the first chapter (set in 1520) reads like a twisted fairytale, the final section (set in the mid to late 80s) has only the vaguest whisper of magic about it, and it's almost exclusively attached to older characters.

I loved this execution, because it built into the bones of the narrative that very essence of the memories of the past as understood by those in the present being almost magical, especially when it comes to familial/national histories.

In the US at least, this mythologizing of the past is embedded in our very understanding of ourselves as a nation. Stories like 'The Boston Tea Party', 'one if by land, two if by sea,' the writing of the Constitution by the 'Founding Fathers,' the 'first Thanksgiving.' All of these are stories that most Americans recognize and could enthusiastically recount. However, I'd be willing to bet that if somehow a modern American could tell one of these stories to those that actually experienced these events, they would be rather surprised by some of the embellishments, smoothings over, and downright incorrectness. But then again, even those that were there probably didn't remember those things the same way either.

Because what even is the truth, anyway? Whose truth? As Høeg says succinctly:

"History is always an invention; it is a fairy tale built upon certain clues. [...] These clues are pretty well established; most of them can be laid on the desktop for anyone to handle. But these, unfortunately, do not constitute history. History consists of the links between them, and it is this that presents the problem. And the link is especially opaque when, as here, we are dealing with the History of Dreams, because the only thing that anyone --and that includes me-- can use to fill in the gaps between history's clues is themselves. (p.171)

And boy let me tell you, the stories that Høeg came up with to express the emotional reality of the period of history he covers in this text manage to be both poignant and completely bonkers, especially some of the first few.

We start with a king literally stopping time after determining that his kingdom is the center of the universe. Over the centuries, most of his subjects become so inbred that they lose the ability to talk and are visually indistinguishable from the cows ('how could they have become inbred if time stopped?' one may ask. Because this is a fairy tale and a metaphor. 'nuff said.). It's grotesque, it's uncomfortable, it's sickening...and it's a great way to understand the damage of clinging to tradition, of national isolationism, etc. And (form serving function) a fairytale is also the closest we can get to how people looking back at a period so far away from their own conceptualize the past: three hundred years is both infinitely long and yet somehow nothing changes ('Ancient Egypt' 'the Dark Ages' 'Medieval Ages' feel this way in my mind).

'The History of Danish Dreams' tackles so many social issues beyond just this question of 'what is memory?' that a thorough breakdown would take a book nearly as long.

There are a few things I took issue with here and there that are definitely worth mentioning. Firstly, the pacing towards the end of the final section of the final chapter felt incredibly rushed, like what had been a marathon suddenly became a sprint in the last 50 pages. I could almost feel Høeg running out of steam, which really was a pity given that that is then what a reader is left with. This could partially have been resolved if the final set of children had been reduced to one (the character of Madaline serves no real purpose whatsoever). The idea of twins as an image could have been interesting, except that Høeg didn't do anything interesting with it. Or, if it could have been interesting, it went by so quickly it wasn't possible for him to really tease that brilliance out.

Secondly, and this was just more of a feeling I had, but I didn't care for Høeg's presentation of 'the racialized other' in this novel. This only comes up twice explicitely, but both times it struck me how both women of color he presents (implied to be gypsies) are the exact caricature you'd expect: a circus performer turned thief, and a granddaughter who is incapable of not getting kicked out of every school she attends (she starts fights, she cuts class, she starts a fire at one point, she develops a drug addiction...). And neither of these characters are ever really given a voice, and one isn't even given a name and is simply referred to as 'The Princess.' I dunno, maybe this wouldn't bother other readers, but it really leapt out at me.

Not to end on a sour note, especially given how much I enjoyed the reading experience, I want to highlight several sections that really touched me:

1. The section in the chapter 'Adonis and Anna' where Høeg describes how both characters woefully misunderstand their own dire circumstances, to their eventual detriment:

"Most of the time I am afraid that [Adonis] is walking with his eyes only half-open, or even closed. He might well be Aladdin, but he is also blind, and this is a disturbing combination; a blind Aladdin perpetually smiling at a world he cannot properly see [...] After all, who is going to believe a young girl who tells them they are living in a sinking Atlantis [...]?" (p.148, 155)

The myth of meritocracy from the perspective of the poor is particularly vivid, and is one half of Høeg's investigation into class.

2. Carsten's experience of being a 'golden child' in the chapter 'Maria and Cartsten'. Here we have this kid who (to say the absolute least) grows up first with parents in a very toxic relationship, then is completely smothered by a mother who ties her own value to his sucess or failure in life (as determined by her), and so he must be the best at everything he does. And yet, because of this being such a nebulous goal, he never has the chance to be fully present at any point during his school days or post-graduate education, and never at any time gets to self-actualize, leading to severe depression as a middle-aged adult.

On lingering exploratory tours of his childhood home --where everything was coated with a thick but transparent layer of memories--he discovered that it looked just as it had always done, and yet it had changed irrevocably. [...] What Carsten became aware of during these days was that phenomenon he had already sensed at Søro [...] the relentlessness of time. Anyone else might have seen the white villa in a different light, but Carsten was as he was, and what now confronted him--sighing and wailing, and yet silent and uneasy-- was the traces of a bygone time and the pain of knowing that it will never come again, that it had gone [...] This longing for an imaginary past was to remain with Carsten all his days, transforming, as time went on, into a pale, faint melancholy. (p.337)

Stunning prose, and a very good sample of the whimsical melancholy that the entire novel is drenched in.

I hope to return to 'The History of Danish Dreams' once the dust settles over this first read-through. I have so many notes on other themes (nationalism, intergenerational trauma) that I couldn't quite pull together for any kind of argument this go-round.

This is a great place to start when it comes to Danish literature (especially of the twentieth century) because it covers so much of the context that I imagine would be relevant when getting stuck into anything else written in the 1900s, so you'd have a sense of pertinant events that came before, during, or after its time.

Absolutely loved it.