BORDERLINERS by Peter Hoeg

Finished (with it!) Th 3/29/18

This is one of my old trade paperbacks, and I'd never read it. I had pulled it from one of the shelves downstairs, and then I heard a podcast with Greg Iles and he said that one of his favorite characters in all of literature was one from SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW.

I remember that novel was made into a film and it was a kind of murder/ mystery set in Denmark about a character who uses her extreme knowledge of snow to solve the crime- more of less.

A difficult and laborious read. I did a painful two hundred pages with little or no understanding, and then skimmed to the end.

It's set in a Danish orphanage/ private school that is part of some kind of a social experiment.

The title might mean that in this experiment of  'social Darwinism' some of the participants will succeed, some will fail, and some will be 'borderliners'.

Parts of it are somewhat interesting, but, overall, not worth the effort.

A strange subplot or perspective of the author is his infatuation with Time. He writes about the first town in the fourteenth century to have a public clock. He says that no one was aware of Time in the sense of 'what time is it'? But, because of the intricacy of the clock/ machine, it was appreciated more as a representation of the precise nature of  God's handiwork.

All kinds of descriptions of 'the shape of time' and other strange observations. But what this has to do with the action within the novel is unclear- at least to me.

From Amazon-

"Strange things are happening at Biehl's Academy when this elite school opens its doors to a group of orphans and reform-school rejects, kids at the end of the system's tether. But the school is run by a peculiar set of rules by which every minute is regimented and controlled. The children soon suspect that they are guinea pigs in a bizarre social experiment, and that their only hope of escape is to break through a dangerous threshold of time and space. Peter Høeg's "brilliant" and dystopian Borderliners is a "uniquely philosophical thriller" (Boston Sunday Globe) and a haunting story of childhood travail and hope."

From Wikipedia-

"Peter is a student at Biehl's after spending all of his life in children's homes and reform schools. He is a borderline case, along with Katarina, whose parents both died in the past year, and August, who is severely disturbed after killing his abusive parents. Although allowed no social interaction, the children conspire to conduct their own experiment to discover what plan is being carried out at Biehl's. Høeg touches on some of the same themes as in his acclaimed Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - neglected children, scientific experiments, and technology - but Borderliners is not a thriller and may not appeal to the same audience. It is instead a fascinating intellectual puzzle that explores the themes of social control, child assessment, family, and the concept of time.

The book is also somewhat autobiographical, as it reflects Høeg's own schooldays at a Copenhagen private school."