The Quiet Girl

by Peter Høeg

Book Overview

The internationally acclaimed bestselling author of Smilla's Sense of Snow returns with this "engrossing, beautifully written tale of suspense . . . captivating" (The Miami Herald).

Set in Denmark in the here and now, Peter Hoeg's The Quiet Girl centers around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with a deep love for the music of Johan Sebastian Bach, and an even deeper gambling debt. Wanted for tax evasion...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312427778
• ISBN13: 9780312427771
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant

I loved this book! The author is clearly a brilliant man and he kept my interest on a number of levels. It was a bit hard to follow in places (may be due to translation) - but not that hard. You can't skim this book - you have to digest every sentence to really get it. The book is teaming with fascinating references and some of his lines are quote-worthy. There's an ethereal romantic quality to the book as well as being very exciting. I stayed up to the wee hours to finish it.

Horses for courses.

If you want a plot driven, tight taut, linear drama book to read on the plane, this is not for you I love this book. I read it as slowly as possible to savour it. Then I read it again to try and unravel it further. If you like Leonard Cohen songs even though they are incoherent and you can't tell what they mean just because of the beauty of the odd image they evoke? If you possibly read and adored the complex almost poetry prose of Ann Michaels' Fugitive Pieces? If you have ever been to and been smitten by Copenhagen? If you find the Danes a conundrum? If Bach makes you feel better? This book is for you

Hoeg mixes science & mystery for a real winner

"Part mystery, part thriller, part science project and part modern fiction, The Quiet Girl is the perfect book for fans of Hoeg's previous best seller, Smilla's Sense of Snow."

Listen: What you're hearing is great writing!

Welcome to the world of inventive, creative, writing. This is a superb example of writing that appeals to the senses. Complex, evocative, and wonderful in it's scope and delivery with words and sounds, musical references and scenes that (can it be true?) make you think and awaken the mind to possibilities and insights of the human condition. No, it is not a "schlock" thriller, guys. It's what good writing is all about, and then some. Five stars! This writer is not clowning around.

Harpo Marx gets a big Hoeg

Take a map at 1:25 scale of human experience. Place the point of your compass on the Circus and draw a circle with a 3-mile radius. Now find Bach and draw another circle of the same radius. Now find the city of Copenhagen and its environs; locate the pivot arm on its historic center heavily enough to make it drop 10 feet and let the water in. Draw the next circle. Continue with the science of acoustics, with hydrology and city sewer systems, with insurance and real estate, with the Russian Orthodox Church. Overlay a map of literary experience on the same scale, and draw a small circle around Sherlock Holmes's Moriarty and a big one around all the stories in which the hero wants to protect the weak and ends up getting beaten to within an inch of his life but keeps going. Smilla's Sense of Snow, for example, which fits nicely also over the map of Copenhagen. At this point, you might as well toss the maps and read Peter Hoeg's The Quiet Girl instead, which takes place where all these circles overlap. As a thriller, it is an odd one. I guessed a couple of main plot points long before they were revealed at the end, but the revelation still left me gasping. No, no, not possible--this did not make any sense at all. I had to start rereading the book and sure enough the plot is all there, more than there. There is a huge amount of sleight-of-hand in the book, so you follow one ball and think you know where it's going but in fact you get it mixed up with several others. I guess in a sense it is two books, the one you read the first time and the one you read the second time. Maybe another the third time--I haven't gotten that far. The first time, it was a plunge into a different version of the world. Apparently Hoeg incorporates some of the teachings of a Danish New Agey writer/philosopher named Jes Bertelsen, but with big, significant changes that naturalize them, and with a compassion that keeps the action on the level of comedy, with all the normal, untranscended human pain that implies. The book is very funny. Whether you like this book or not may depend on whether you would like to have Harpo Marx sit on your lap--or you would like to be Harp Marx thinking about sitting on a woman's lap. The hero, Kasper Krone, is a great artist. He is a world-famous clown, recognized in the streets, a man who makes two thousand people at a time feel he loves each of them personally. He improvises sweet talk, blackmail, or physical force to fit any situation. He is a good enough violinist to record commercial CDs. He is a great poker player, until one night when he is in his early 40s, when he abruptly loses track of how to win. He loves cars and taxis, good food and champagne, beautiful women. He can on the other hand live for days, evidently, on Armagnac and espresso, with no possession of value except the pen with which he signs autographs. Kasper has the ability to hear sounds with extreme clarity, so that he has a side business as an acoustics consultant