Also, the Author Picture in the Article Is Really Scary

Peter Hoeg claims his new novel will not be off-putting, but we seriously doubt it, because every single one of his novels has been off-putting and great, including The Quiet Girl, but especially Borderliners and Smilla. Also, how pleasant can anything titled The Elephant Keepers’ Children really be? Let’s just be honest with ourselves. It doesn’t matter if the publishers picked a soothing color palette for the cover.

He was shocked by the reaction to The Quiet Girl, a multilayered philosophical thriller about a gambling clown with a Bach obsession. “I know it was a difficult book, but the amount of information you have to process to understand the first of the Matrix films or Memento or Inception, the number of different levels you have to work on… my book is nothing compared to that.”

The key to Hoeg, or to Foster Wallace, or anything “weird,” and this is a really good piece of advice, so pay attention, is just to surf a bit. Pick it up, put it down, find things you enjoy, write down sentences that go WAHHHH, and don’t get too hung up on “what’s happening? who’s that? why is there suddenly a giant squid in Manhattan?” If you don’t have to write a book report, or something, it’s not necessary to be able to summarize the plot, afterwards, even. Seriously! Free yourself! What happened with the gambling, Bach-obsessed clown? I don’t know, don’t ask me, I only read it twice.