Tales of the Night is a translation from Danish to English of eight short stories all about love. The love in the stories is not always in the form of romance. Love appears as violence, as a curse, as redemption, as suffering, as wisdom, as innocence and as delusion. In addition to this, each story takes place on the night of March 19th 1929.

People who enjoy stories that are concerned with the human condition and are prepared to read tales that are clearly unique and full of complex emotions will like this.

I love the variety of characters over the eight stories. The protagonists range from a mathematician to a mirror-maker to a ballet dancer. They all try to understand or express love from their perspectives. Each struggle to find truths and gone on adventures of mind and body in the process.

My favourite story was probably the first, called Journey Into A Dark Heart. It is set in Africa and follows a young mathematician who is in love really with truth; his pure mind and direct questions cause other characters to shed their guises and a train journey becomes a revealing adventure. This story also confronts the stereotypes of Africa during the early 20th century through the characters' discussions.

Some of the characters are fictitious and some are real. Historical figures such as the mystic poet Rumi and the scientists Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein feature at some point. The author integrates the two well and you really enter this new world where the tragic, the true and the comic intermingle the lives of enigmatic characters. The author's imagination is quite brilliant. There are all these little shocks and points that strike the reader in the middle of a story.

The tone of the narrative is unusual. It's relatively detached even when a story is written in the first person; it gives the reader a clear overview of all the stories - you begin to understand what all these characters have in common.

The language is really poised and inventive. There is impressive intellect in the writing. I picked up on some subtle criticism at Western culture and this made the stories even more meaningful.

I found one of the stories to be not as interesting as the rest. This was Story Of A Marriage. I felt it had some unnecessary details, although the twist at the end works very well and is worth waiting for.

This book of stories makes you think of how truly you lead your life and relationships. Some characters have been leading a life of lies and then in the stories they embrace love genuinely and their masks drop away.

Peter Høeg is one of Denmark's finest writers. He has also written Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow which was made into a film. His first novel was The History of Danish Dreams and two recent books include the controversial novel, Borderlines and the satirical fable, The Woman and the Ape. As well as being a writer Høeg has also been a ballet dancer, an actor, a sailor and mountaineer - clearly a man with many talents.

I've read Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow and thought it was and excellent crime novel. His writing is very sophisticated and he has an original style. This is definitely an author worth checking out.

It's free of heavy realism and allows the reader to escape into a world that is mysterious and in search of truth. You will find yourself wishing to meet the characters in these tales.

On the first page of my copy of the book is a picture of two ballet dancers. It almost gives the reader poise before devouring these beautifully spun stories.

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Created Jun 21, 2004 at 1:23pm • Submit your own review...