When you have children, you find out that you have so much to learn. Not all of it makes sense at first. One of the things I’ve had to learn, was how to praise my child. That if your child has climbed high up on top of something and she says ‘look at me’, you’re not supposed to say ‘oh how good you are’ but rather, ‘oh look how high you’ve climbed!’ You do this to praise the action, not the child itself, so the child doesn’t think it has to do such things to have value. I think.In part, this novel is about this. About how we value each others, how we evaluate children and students. It’s about three children, Peter, Katarina and August. Peter was orphaned at a very early age. Katarine has lived through her parents’ suicides. And August has been the offer of so much abuse that he finally snapped and killed his parents. They all attend Biehl’s Academy, an elite private school in Copenhagen, but something’s not quite right. All three have lost their parents and especially August are a troubled child. A troubled child that doesn’t belong in this particular school. So why is he there?Peter and Katarina quickly discovers that there’s a plan with the school, there’s a plan with the students accepted to the school, with how the school is run. Trouble is, they don’t know what the plan is and they are not really allowed to talk with each other so they can figure it out. It’s pretty clear that it’s some kind of social experiment, some kind of attempt to prevent what you can call social darwinism. The school wants to take all the children, including the troubled ones, and bring them up and into the light, so to speak, by enforcing a very strict discipline. But if you choose a strict principle and stick to it no matter what, the result can be devastating even though your intention was noble in the first place. Especially in the school system if you forget that students are individuals and should be treated as such – and hitting children never do any good.One of the things Peter and Katarina focuses on, is the question of time. How time changes depending on the situation you’re in. The importance of pauses. What lies between the lines. How there’s never been made a watch that’s precise, and what it does to you to have your entire life completely structured – and to be punished if you’re just a bit late.This novel is slowly paced but then, all of a sudden, things happen. Crazy, painful, jarring things that makes you stop and go back and read it again to see if you really read what you think you read. And you did and your jaw drops – and then, the novel resumes it’s slow even pace and things proceed nicely and quietly. The chronology is also jumping from various points in the past to the present, making you have to stay focused all the time. I think that’s one of the reasons the slow pace works in this novel. In it’s pacing, I think it shows some of the points the narrator, Peter, makes about time. How suddenly events happen that change the way we live in time, the way we experience time. When these violent events happens in the book, you too are violently dragged into it and have to feel the immediacy of the action. Just for a few sentences. And then things slow down again and you can relax into the text once more. One of the things Peter wants to examine is if time moves faster when you’re not paying attention and I think the way Høeg wrote his book, is an example of this. When the jarring events occur, time stops for a little while – you are forced to focus and pay attention, and then, you read one and time starts flowing by again.One thing I really love about this novel is the relationship between the grown Peter and his small daughter. How he has a hard time relating to her because of the abuse he has suffered throughout his life, the way the system failed him and he was too old before he had proper role models. But together, they find a common ground and she, perhaps, helps him most of all by just being a child, being pure feeling and reaction. She tries to bring order to her universe by listing all words she knows. She doesn’t get time at first – no children do – so she tries to understand it through other subjects that she does know. I think this relationship between father and daughter are beautifully rendered in it’s fragility.The narrator in this book is named Peter Høeg, the same as the author. Every school and institution the narrator Peter Høeg talks about in his novel excluding Biehl’s Academy, are real and Peter Høeg has stated that the novel was the most autobiographical of his works (at that point). When it was published, it was taken as an attack on the Danish school system from a man who had experienced the worst of it himself. But later, Peter Høeg reveals that the adoptive parents in the novel are in fact his real parents, that the only autobiographical elements in the book are his first and last name, his year of birth and his parents. Which means that the novel is about him – but at the same time, that it’s not necessarily about him at all. Peter Høeg has never lived anywhere else than with his biological parents. Even though he claimed in interviews that where the institutions were real, the events taking place were also real. But with the case of the fictive Peter Høeg getting punished by having his head stuck down in a toilet, that did happen – just not to him – and so on.The things that did happen, are instead the things that take place on the fictive school. Biehl’s Academy is called Bordings Friskole in the real world and here the author went to school for nine years – and how the teachers hit the students on a regular basis and that Peter was kicked out of school at age 16, is true – among other things.This means, that this book is a blur between fiction and reality. There used to be a sort of agreement between readers and authors that either everything in a novel was true or else, it was false, fiction. This agreement is no longer in existence. Now authors take parts of their life or others’ lives, and use it as they see fit. In Denmark, we have seen several examples of this. And it seem to make some people angry – on the point of law suits and of people being persecuted in the medias, loosing their jobs etc. Peter Høeg does it in this novel – other examples are Knud Romer’s novel Den Som Blinker Er Bange For Døden and Jørgen Leth Det uperfekte menneske (apparently, neither of these has been translated to English).For me, I love this play on reality. I think that this challenges the novel and explores the possibilities of combining fiction and reality in ways that we have never seen before. It doesn’t diminish the worth of the novel in any way. Rather, it’s the authors’s attempt to express themselves and their creativity and vision in ways they see fit. And Peter Høeg does this so very well in De måske egnede (which by the way is a much more appropriate title than the English Borderliners since the Danish title plays on Darwin’s expression of ‘survival of the fittest’.
I chose this for my most recent book club selection, based on the synopsis, the high rating, and the fact that I'd seen and loved the movie Smilla's Sense of Snow. I don't wish to belabor points already raised by so many reviewers before me, so I'll just comment on how I experienced it. To be candid, I didn't like it very much the first time (though I wouldn't have said it was bad). Because I had to lead the upcoming book club discussion, I read it again, and the second time through I really enjoyed it. So what was the problem the first time? I think I did have expectations based on what I'd read "about" the book that caused me to be looking for things that weren't there. I think I thought it would be more of a thriller, and I also thought the adults and institutions would be more sinister. Instead, I think the book points out the sinister aspects of things that many of us are already familiar with to some extent. So it wasn't as shocking as I expected. Another issue that discolored my initial read, was the structural combination of jumping chronologically, jumping to different settings/characters, and the sparse style. Hoeg doesn't use much detailed descriptions, and the flow seems to be mostly guided by the narrator's stream of consciousness. I felt confused much of the time - Who ARE these people? WHERE are we? WHEN are we? Yet, on the second read, I would not have changed any of these points. The sparse style is part of the beauty of this book. To paraphrase one of the characters, you have to listen to the pauses between Hoeg's words. What he doesn't say, his decisions on what to leave out, or leave to the reader's imagination, is just as important as what he does say. The final problem, of course, is the discourses on the nature of time, which are strewn lightly throughout Parts 1 and 2, but seem to make up the bulk of Part 3. (There are three "Parts" total.) As others have said, at times these are interesting and seem pertinent, but often they are tedious, boring, and severely interrupt the flow of the story. The only excuse I can imagine for keeping them is that they are "true to the character". Despite these difficulties, I have to rate this at 4 stars, which is high on my personal scale. During my second read, since I knew what to expect (or what not to expect) and I was no longer confused, the many positive points of this novel came through. The book deals with a long list of topics which are relevant to our times. The characters are interesting and sympathetic. The style is beautiful in its apparent simplicity. I expect that, like many great works of art, each succeeding experience will reveal new depths. I would recommend it, but note that it is not for everyone. Although I found it to be uplifting in the end, many of my fellow book club members found it to be too sad and depressing throughout. If you are looking solely for entertainment, you might skip this one. If you enjoy something that makes you think, definitely give this a chance!
What do You think about Borderliners (1995)?
I read this a full decade before the television-viewing world discovered that the Danish had an expertise in misery drama...And what an awful and depressing tale it is. Three social misfits, in and out of care homes and occasionally drugged to zombification by the authorities to whose care they are entrusted. I was going through a miserable time myself when I read this Christmas present from a friend. Bizarrely, I was also hanging around a pub at the bottom end of Wardour Street (Soho) which was staffed by young Danes who had been in care homes. So it still resonates now when I write it. I feel an unpleasant, dull ache in my bones.So the children figure out that they're part of an experiment. I think the surprising thing is that this is no surprise. 'Care professionals' have a history of screwing up people's lives. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Is the faceless state screwing up your life more or less acceptable than your parents doing it for you? I can only wonder.
—Mark Speed
Trochu skľučujúce, v zásade smutné, ale niesentimentálne. Premýšľavé a bystré, ale nie zbytočne premúdrelé.Je to o súkromnej internátnej škole v Dánsku v 70. rokoch, o nie úplneradostných pomeroch, o vnútorných pochodoch hlavného hrdinu (ktorý je sícepovažovaný za podpriemerne nadaného, napriek tomu to však rozhodne nie jeslaboduché chlapča) a najmä o čase. A nech to znie hoc ako vágne, zaujímavýchmyšlienok tam nie je málo, okrem tých "zjavných právd", ktoré každý sám v sebetak nejak vie."Bez Kateřiny bych na to nepřišel. Přestože jsme spolu mluvili dost málo,obzvlášť v posledních týdnech. Ale ona po něčem pátrala. Když člověk potkáněkoho, kdo hledá, tak odloží rezignaci na později.Byl tu taky August, ten měl hodně špatnou pamäť. Za první dva týdny se nemohlpřihlásit ani jednou. Člověk měl pocit, že je nutné ho podpořit. Jestliže chcepodporovat jiné, musí se sám držet zpříma.""V životě každého člověka, na všech myslitelných úrovních, jsou nepřetržitě cyklické i lineární rysy, opakování bez rozdílu i unikátní jednotlivé události."
—Eva Lavrikova
Peter HoegOnce you have realized that there is no objective external world to be found, that what you know is only a filtered and processed version, then it is only a short step to the thought that, in that case, other people, too, are nothing but a processed shadow.This is the experiment. There is no objective reality. Whatever we see is edited by our senses, what we see is nothing but our perception of it. The world exists because we are looking at it. And even other people aren't real, they are edited versions as perceived by faulty senses. And if that isn't real...well, then we can look at people as playthings, objects to be molded into a fashion and for a purpose, which also isn't real but fun to play with.And that opens the door to the darkness, to where the monsters come out to fashion human beings into building blocks that can be manipulated in economic and political fashions, towards anything that satisfies the monster's lust for power. Nothing is real anyway. We are all equal in our unreality, and so the world turns grey, emotions are plasticized versions of whatever ideas we are fed, passion is purely a chemical reaction, there is no such thing as free will, and out there in the real world, buildings rise up and are built of bare concrete, also grey; economies are but massive chronological machines of human production and life and death are meaningless. They aren't real either. And if you think this is allegory, or a fairy tale, take a look at world history! Marxism, Communism, Totalitarianism, Fascism: the monsters eagerly embrace the experiment and we have only to look at the their results to know the truth of it. But much more benign versions exist as well, some not so easily recognizable, perhaps smaller stepping stones (mixed economies and social democracies) towards the same end: government plantations, if you will. Hoeg in Borderliners explores the one essential step towards mollifying the masses to prepare them to accept the experiment: our youth, our educational system where it all begins. In short: control human beings by controlling space and time. The story takes place in Copenhagen's private schools and boarding schools. But, it could just as easily have been placed just North, in Sweden, long believed to be the one successful implementation of a social welfare system. If you've read Stieg Larsson's condemnation of Sweden's social policies, if you've read Mankell, or Nesbo, or just about any Scandinavian crime writer than you will be aware that the world is slowly opening its eyes as to these outright fallacies, as to this idealistic view we have towards Scandinavia. The cracks have appeared in the wall and monsters are slipping through:High Suicide rates, social experiments on children, castration, uncontrolled immigration and asylum policies and a resultant rise in crime, Alva Myrdal (nobel peace prize winner) whose name was further tarnished in 1997 when the journalist Maciej Zaremba exposed the darkness at the core of her book from 1934 Crisis in the Population Question—which she co-authored with her husband. It is widely recognized as the founding document of the Swedish welfare state (her son publicly condemned Alva her for his upbringing), and of course, the assassination of prime minister Olaf Palmer (Swedish version of the JFK assassination)...all represent a definitive break with naivete.Hoeg's story is about the borderliners, three children in particular: borderliners are children who do not fit into the mold as prescribed by population policies. To re-engage them into society, to assimilate them the children are placed in a private boarding school run by a man named Biehl. There, the secret experiment is unleashed upon them.The experiment consists of bringing into the fold, borderliners, and does so by controlling a child's sense of space and time. Space is where you are at any one time, strictly regulated by the school and violated by our borderliners as part of their own counter-experiment. Time is either linear or circular and by assigning linear time to every activity in the school, and circular time to the space students are in at any time, the mind has no time to speculate, to wonder, to innovate anything. Life becomes a monotonous, droll existence seemingly one of complete determinism. Of course, to my mind, the error Hoeg makes is to imply (via our narrator) that the solution towards which the borderliners wrestle is different from the school's experiment being conducted. In reality, we know this is circular thinking. The solution to the experiment, to these three children, is to take the experiment one step further. With a nod to Edgar Allen Poe, the pair of ravens that symbolize the school's emblem also symbolize the book's very dark center.And here I'll unleash my criticism of the book. Hoeg, unlike Smilla's Sense of Snow (which I loved) does not seem to be able to decide between writing this as a novel or a memoir. It is widely acknowledged that Borderliners is part autobiographical. The narrator in the book, in fact, is adopted by a family named Hoeg. On the one hand we have long, convoluted dissertations on the notions of time and space, interspersed with philosophical Kantian musings, followed by fledgling plot elements that are constantly broken by the stream of consciousness style. You may be interested in both notions, or only one, but in my opinion Hoeg fails in writing one cohesive novel as a result. I am giving this book 3 stars, for those reasons.
—Harry
