OLD TRUNK

By John Skow

ONE OF THE STRONG SUBSURface themes of Smilla's Sense of Snow, the fine 1993 thriller by Peter Hoeg, a Danish novelist then new to America, was a slyly expressed contempt for what the author saw as his country's bourgeois self-satisfaction. This much relished contempt and cheerfully malign slyness are the driving forces of Hoeg's first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 356 pages; $24), which has now been issued in the U.S. That said, there's not much similarity between the two novels. Smilla has a powerful narrative flow; Dreams is a lumpish absurdity that fuddles to a halt after several dozen pages, begins again with new characters and repeats this throat clearing until well past the book's midsection. In these first chapters Hoeg tries something like magic realism, then gives up a promising experiment.

This extreme awkwardness of construction makes Dreams, which belabors the smugness and provincialism of Danish society from feudal times to the present, seem far longer than it is. There are passages, not murky but mightily centrifugal, in which the reader's eyes slide off the page. And in something like equal number, or a bit more, there are set pieces, two or three or several dozen pages long, that are among the funniest satirical sketches seen in years.

In Hoeg's ferocious burlesque, burgerlich awfulness has its own flavor in Denmark. One of his best chapters has a dissolute theology student, who has been drinking, whoring and mocking his professors for several years, sneering as his negligee-clad girlfriend reads him a letter from home. "Your father is dead," she reports. "To hell with him," says he. Just then his mother's portrait falls off the wall to the floor. His shallow rebellion vanishes at this omen. He sinks to his knees, repents and returns home to preach hellfire to amazed and grateful peasants. If Dreams is regarded not as a novel but as a marvelous trunkful of loosely related funny bits like this one, it is a great success.