The Literary Prince of Denmark : With ‘Smilla’s Sense of Snow,’ Novelist Peter Hoeg Was Dragged, Kicking and Screaming, Into the Limelight. His New Nove, ‘Borderlines,’ Secures His Place as His Country’s Conscience.

There is a Literary Law in Denmark known as the Jante Principal. Taken from an early 20th-Century Danish novel by Aksel Sandemose, it goes: “Thou shalt not get too famous and make too much money.” To succeed as a writer is unethical. Too much praise is like the Emperor’s New Clothes, a sleight of hand, an illusion.

Novelist Peter Hoeg ahs failed to obey this and other commandments in a big way. In 1993, Farrar, Straus & Giroux--which obeys a different Literary Law: Resist Modern Taste and Popular Culture in Favor of Old-Fashioned Elegance--published “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” Hoeg’s third book but the first to appear in the United States. The initial printing was 40,000.

By the end of the year, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” had sold about 120,000 copies, spent 21 weeks on The Times Bestseller List and 11 weeks on the New York Times list, had been translated into 25 languages (including Indonesian, Polish and Portuguese) and had been named by Time magazine as the top novel of 1993. The paperback, which went on sale in August, has already sold nearly a million copies--an astonishing figure for a novel that takes place in two countries, Denmark and Greenland, that few Americans would choose to escape to for their family holiday, much less their armchair fiction. Forget Literary Laws, “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” was more like a UFO sighting--a highbrow Danish thriller that sold like “The Bridges of Madison County.”

Set in the chilly, unwelcoming world of the Scandinavian winter, the soul of the book is Denmark’s 600-year guilt-ridden relationship with Greenland--terra infirma in the conscience of a country that thinks of itself, and is regarded by much of the world, as the most gentle, humane and progressive in Western Europe. Reluctant colonialist, the Danes have historically mistreated and misunderstood the darker-skinned Greenlanders, Inuits whose own culture can be brutal. And that is not the only form of cruelty that Hoeg draws on. The characters, who muster every bit of social weaponry to hurt one another (money, clothes, bureaucratic authority, wit, sarcasm, but most of all, cultural heritage) are for the most part cold, isolated and frightened--none more so that the book’s fierce heroine, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jasperson.

Half Danish and half Inuit, Smilla is 37 years old when the novel opens. A glacial morphologist by training, she is a woman who is constitutionally and genetically unable to hold a job or get sloppy over a relationship, a woman who thinks “more highly of snow and ice than love.” she dresses impeccably, with some inspiration from her Inuit mother (deerskin Kamiks) and funding from her rich anesthesiologist father, who loves her. “You’re damned heartless, Smilla,” her father tells her early on in the book. “And that’s why you’ve never been able to hold onto a man.” “Father,” says Smilla, “write me a prescription.” As Merete Ries, Hoeg’s Danish publisher, says: “We all agree about Smilla. She’s so bitter and angry. But still, there’s a hole in her heart where the daylight shines through.”

Every one of Hoeg’s crystalline sentences is complete, taut and full of clues. The words are sharp and blunt. You read the first couple of pages and don’t have to go back and reread passages, even though Hoeg imparts enormous quantities of information--about the structure of snow, the history of the Inuits, the intricacies of the Danish bureaucracy or Valencia ruffles on linen dresses. Readers are lured into the freezing, predatory ocean world of this novel in the hopes that they will be pulled up, sometime soon, into the warm place in Smilla’s native heart.

In the two years since the Danish publication of “Smilla,” Hoeg has become a national hero--the country’s most revered novelist since Isak Dinesen. The Jante Law notwithstanding, the Danish government has awarded Hoeg a lifetime grant that guarantees he and his family will be provided for if his income slips below a certain level. The first novelist to receive the grant since Dinesen, Hoeg is unlikely ever to need the money. In hardcover rights alone, “Smilla” has earned considerably more than $1 million.

And now Farrar, Straus & Giroux is about to come out with Hoeg’s next novel, “Borderlines.” The story of three children in an institution that is part boarding school, part reform school, and part orphanage, in which horrific but banal experiments are conducted with the students’ sense of time, “Borderlines” caused an avalanche of controversy in Denmark. The government, it turns out, conducted similar experiments in the 1960s.

You cannot walk past a bookstore in Copenhagen without seeing a poster-size photo of Hoeg, one of his four books or a T-shirt bearing his name. Fiercely protective of his privacy, he has given so few face-to-face interviews, over the years that stories about him circulate, about which neighborhood he grew up on and where he went to school. Daily newspapers debate where he gets his material, why he’s so critical and whether he really knows so much about Kant and icebergs.

It’s as if Hoeg has become his country’s conscience. He lives without a fax, computer or TV, has stopped taking advances because they threaten the quality of his writing, doesn’t do book tours, doesn’t get involved in translations or screenplays because he believes in the artistic integrity of the people who do translations and screenplays and doesn’t even know how much money his books have made.

“If you meet him, he will change you life,” Danish citizens told me again and again, as though I was about to receive some golden secret that I had access to only as a foreigner, like those emissaries who come for the new Dalai Lama. People who know Hoeg describe him in a language that could come from another universe or century. “He is like a fairy person,” said an old friend. “(He’s like some kind of wood elf,” said another. After a few such comments, I began to rebel, holding on irrationally to the parts of my personality I actually planned to keep in his presence. I became, in the days before I met Hoeg, a virtual caricature of the good listener--the doubting critic.

One day in 1987, Hoeg, then 30 years old and a student at the royal Danish Ballet, bicycled up to the door of Rosinante, a small but highly respected publishing house in Copenhagen. He was carrying the manuscript of his first novel, which he hoped would bring in a $3,000 advance so that he and his wife, Akinyi, could go to the West Indies for a few months. All he hoped for was maybe a couple thousand Danish readers.

He asked for Merete Ries, the founder of Rosinante, who, rumor held, actually read the books. His friend, composer Per Norgaard, accidentally met Hoeg that day in the gray, medieval street where the publishing house is located (an event that, in Denmark, can make one famous, even if writing four symphonies and ballets and the score for “Babette’s Feast” doesn’t). Several years before, Norgaard had written a ballet for Hoeg, but “he hadn’t been dancing for a while, and he said to me: ‘I’ve written a book, and no publisher wants it. Merete Ries will at least read it.”’

Ries did more than that. She published the novel, “Perceptions of the Twentieth Century,” a magical realist story of four Danish families, and it became an immediate bestseller in Denmark, a country in which bestseller means Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon and Ben Okri, not Robert James Waller. “This is a young man,” says Ries in her office, “who has such a good time writing. He is a sure-handed writer, a publisher’s dream.”

Ries, round, smooth-skinned and in her mid 50s, has carefully watched over Hoeg ever since. In her black wool dress and silver jewelry, she cuts a stylish, no-nonsense figure in the staunch, understated world of Danish letters. When she is not protecting young Danish writers (their head shots line her walls), she is translating Virginia Woolf. “She loves cold water,” Hoeg says of Ries, a high compliment. “In the winter she belongs to a club in the Copenhagen Harbor. They take saunas and dive into the harbor.” Ries is the gateway one must pass through to reach Hoeg, who doesn’t own a telephone or a car. It was Ries who originally turned away the faxes (which are considered aggressive in Denmark) and emissaries that came pouring in from Hollywood after “Smilla’ was published in the United States. Hoeg finally entrusted Danish director Billie August (“Best Intentions,” House of the Spirits”) with the novel. The movie is now in pre-production.

Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, Hoeg’s Danish-born editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is the novelist’s American guardian. Dyssegaard, who has been at the publishing firm for nine years, is too soft-spoken to use the word, but she has made it her mission to introduce Scandinavian literature to the United States. She had been closely monitoring the Hoeg phenomenon in Denmark but didn’t think either of his first two novels would travel well. When she read “Smilla,” she was convinced that the book was ideally suited for American readers. “It is, first and foremost, a beautifully written, literate book, full of powerful emotion and psychological suspense,” says Dyssegaard. “It is an engaging story that makes the reader feel smart.”

But no one at Farrar, Straus & Giroux predicted that “Smilla” would make so many readers feel smart. With no fancy author tour--no brie, no wine, no “Good Morning America”--”Smilla” sold with barely any help from Hoeg, who gave a reluctant handful of interviews. When Farrar, Straus flew Hoeg to New York for his first (and he says last) time, it was so publisher Roger Straus could welcome him into the fold. His visit, though, became an in-house legend.

“There he was, wandering around Union Square,” Straus says, shaking his head, held to his neck by an apricot-colored ascot. “He’s not very big, you know. I thought he might need the money. He and his wife were expecting their second child. So I inquired, “Would you like a small advance? Say, a few hundred thousand or so to tide you over?’ ‘No thank you,’ he said. Just like that. ‘No thank you, Mr. Straus.”’

The drive from Copenhagen to Hoeg’s house in a fishing village near Nykobing is far too short. Hidden by scrub pine, lupines and rose hips and surrounded by dunes are the three tiny cabins that Hoeg, his wife, and their two young daughters share.

I’m expecting the Peter Hoeg of his book-jacket photograph--the one the girls “die-over,” in Ries’ words; the moody Renaissance punk juggler, with his spiked white-blond hair and large-sleeved, heavy white cotton shirt that has become his public uniform (made by his mother); Denmark’s literary prince. But when he comes out to greet me, he’s much more familiar. He’s wearing a fuzzy gray sweater, khaki pants with an incongruous big patch across the bottom, and thick wool socks. Akinyi walks out, smiling, with their 9-month-old baby girl on her hip. Like Hoeg, she is a professional dancer, a leading member of an African dance troupe based in Copenhagen. Graceful and welcoming, she fills in her husband’s reserve.

Without a word, Hoeg leads us to the main cabin, which is small and dark, a summer place where most of the time begs to be spent out of doors; now, with the glacial Danish winter moving in, the cabin is just starting to feel crowded. Hoeg has prepared coffee on a Bunsen burner and arranged the biscotti (which look exotic here, as though they had been brought by schooner and traded for herring). He gathers some blankets and gestures again that we will be talking in the small shed where he does his writing.

Twenty minutes have passed and he has barely spoken a word. I remember that in “Smilla’ he writes that if you want to make a European nervous, don’t say anything, so I am determined not to take his silence personally. His youngest daughter squeals as we walk out, demanding that her father kill a spider she has found in the flowers. “It’s his job,” Akinyi explains.

Hoeg’s work shed is almost entirely filled by a large bed, two chairs, a table and the blue muslin-covered lap board on which he has written all of his novels by hand. When Hoeg begins to speak, his voice is barely audible over the light drizzle against the windows and the roof. Throughout our conversation, he digests my questions--at first, for an excruciatingly long time--letting the seed of his response take shape before he answers. When he can’t find them, he is frustrated, like someone who stutters. He doesn’t laugh often, but when he does, it’s as if the roof of the shed blows off and the rain comes into the coffee cups.

Hoeg describes his own life as a series of pirouettes. The middle-class lawyer’s son who grew up on a fairly poor neighborhood called Christian-shavn, where most of Copenhagen’s Greenlanders still live. The star student who, after university, worked as a housecleaner (“I have a vast knowledge of different kinds of soaps”) and crewed rich people’s boats around the world (“The Italians were the most demanding”). The professional dancer who decided that he was not talented enough and became a novelist (“Now my wife she’s a real dancer”). And the 27-year old writer who did not want to be dependent on money. “I just decided that I would give it up,” he says, as though he were talking about red meat. “I would give up all my material longings and I would take the power that came from that decision. And it’s made me free.”

I ask Hoeg about the money “Smilla” has made, which I vividly imagine piling up somewhere, unattended. “The only reason I even think about it is because it occupies other people’s minds. I have no idea how much money has been made, but I should look into it,” he adds, as though he has behaved irresponsibly. “Akinyi and I , we have the kind of life we want without it. It costs very little for us to live, almost nothing here, and we have a small rented apartment in a very green part of Copenhagen. It’s easier in a rich culture like Denmark, of course, because people are taken care of. Merete Ries has said to me that money is freedom, but I think that’s wrong.”

“A book is like a question,” Hoeg goes on, deflecting my questions about his success. “You receive answers from readers and reviewers in the years after it is published. Once I had only 5,000 Danish readers, but now ... “ his palms float upward. “I can’t be anything for these people unless I write, and I can only write with a lot of peace--a very quiet daily life, with very few things and a very few close friends.

He describes his uncluttered life in the country: Mornings of meditation and time with the family, followed by afternoons of writings. “I cannot stand stress. I would disintegrate under too much stress and bad conscience if I didn’t spend time with Akinyi and the children. I believe that we write with our whole bodies, with every cell. If there is bad conscience stored somewhere, that part of you won’t write.”

I ask Hoeg if he got as attached to Smilla, writing in her voice, as his readers did. “Smilla was like a state of mind for me,” he explains. “I’m not sure that for an author there can exist persons in books. Only language exists. Where you are sitting now, you are a person to me. If I try to describe you, you transform, you become language--something much less. Books are very little, but they are a form, like nature, and a reader builds her won pictures. What you can do as a writer is make a very good form, but you can’t fill it. This is what I like so much. It has to be field, and there’s a reader who fills it. I make the trick. I make the illusion possible. It’s not important what a writer knows but what he appears to know.”

“A book is often an answer to a previous book,” Hoeg says, when I ask him about “Borderlines,” which arrives in bookstores this month. Although expectations for “Borderlines” run high--the first printing is for 75,000 copies--Hoeg has said publicly and, one suspects, hopefully, that the novel may throw him “back into obscurity.” Half novel, half essay, “Borderlines” is a much more deeply disturbing book than “Smilla.” “I wasn’t so nice to the reader,” Hoeg admits.

It is the only book in which Hoeg has allowed himself to be flagrantly autobiographical. The main character in “Borderlines” is named Peter; the book is set in the ‘70s, when Hoeg would have been in school, and there are passages in which the author, now grown , looks at his sleeping baby daughter and thinks about the responsibilities of raising children.

“Every person carries biographical scars,” he tells me when I ask if he was also an outsider--a borderliner. “When you write you spend some hours each day in a landscape completely outside normal reality. It isn’t madness, but I do identify very easily with any kind of outsider. I can see that it is a question of very small differences that separates the one who looks normal from the others. I wrote ‘Borderliners’ because I have had, my whole life, troubles with time. Children don’t learn that much in all those years of school, but they are taught how to mark time. And here in Western civilization they start working too hard too early. I mean Denmark has its beauty and its social structure, but it also has its price. Everyday, in my body, I can feel the tensions of the culture that I live in. And I know that to break under the tension is to fail somehow.”

Copenhagen has gotten a few degrees cooler. I am struck by the mild air, the mild food, the mild faces. Most of the summer tourists are gone, and the citizens stroll along the combed gravel walks, hands folded behind their backs, past the Little Mermaid guarding the harbor, past the statues of Hans Christian Andersen, past the house he lived in on Nyhavn Boulevard, along the walks he took in Deer Park, all marked by brass plaques. this is a country where contemplation is facilitated by “walking woods” in every town; where too rapid a gesture in public causes heads to turn; where, everyone proudly tells me, “Nobody starves.”

Here is the Denmark of icy surfaces and deep currents that Hoeg’s novels expose and criticize and sometimes shatter. And criticism, we Americans often forget, doesn’t mean one doesn’t love one’s country. In fact, when I tell Hoeg that in spite of my loopy, saturated infatuation with Denmark, I feel frustrated by the politeness that lubricates all social interaction, he asks pointedly where my ancestors are from. When I say Sweden, he sighs and leans back. “Well,” he says, “in Sweden, if you walk on the grass, someone will come running out at you waving their arms and shouting. They are angry; you feel bad. In Denmark, they will gently take you aside and whisper something about the lovely grass. You step off. They feel good; you feel good. It’s part of our feudal tradition. Have another biscuit.”

But Smilla is less than polite. When the half-Inuit boy, Isaiah, whom she has fed, bathed and read to is found dead and the causes don’t add up, she begins the long hunt, tracking down his bureaucratic killers in a way that is part Inuit and part Femme Nikita. In the bargain, she claws apart the entrenched hypocrisy of Denmark-Greenland relations. In “Borderlines,” the boy-turned-angel Humlum watches over his friends as they try to escape from their school to bring a helpless, confused child to safety. One must learn new skills when the old ones won’t suffice.

Characters in both books make sudden, irrevocable decisions that fly in the face of expected behavior. They are all smart, sharp people with something to lose. They behave like warriors, armed with flinty moral ideas about how owe ought to live and treat each other. Once they make these decisions, they cease to flow along with everyone else, under the ice. They crack through.

Through his characters, Hoeg serves as a lightning rod in Denmark, illuminating the fissures and inconsistencies in a way that is downright Swedish, if I may say so. His characters develop ethical systems--sharp tools created with the technology of their moral Danish backgrounds--and then use those belief systems to expose the flaws in their own culture. “When you assess something,” plots the boy Peter in “Borderliners,” using good, clear Scandinavian logic to get out of a gruesome situation, “you are forced to assume that a linear scale of values can be applied to it

No offense, indeed. With each book, Hoeg makes a new language, tries out a new code. Young Peter in “Borderliners” is able to memorize the shape of a key and have a new one made just like it. Six-year-old Isaiah in “Smilla” threatens, with what he has seen, the existence of one of Denmark’s most powerful institutions: the Cryolite Corp.

And this is the really raw nerve: these characters, these victims, are children. It is illegal, in Denmark, to hit a child. Children are not supposed to suffer. So one could say that much like Denmark’s patron saint, Hans Christian Andersen, Peter Hoeg, who describes himself as a river man pushing logs downstream, clears the conscience of his country for the sake of its children.