Each morning when I wake up, I hear the gentle crash and lull of waves on a beach. “Gather, scatter,” as Dorthe Nors describes the sound. My eyes open and blink, adjusting to the dark. The sun’s not up yet. I scoot back into my partner’s body, kept asleep by the rhythmic thrum of the white noise machine, which covers the cars idling in the 7-Eleven parking lot, the motorcyclists showing off their scary-high speeds. For a few minutes, I accept the illusion of a calmer, quiet life. “Gather, scatter.” A life by the sea.
Dorthe Nors’s new book A Line in the World is a masterpiece of place-based nonfiction with soothing, rhythmic sentences that mask the intrusive outside world like a white noise machine. Translated by Caroline Waight, A Line in the World is Nors’s fifth book available in English and her first of nonfiction. The sea, of course, is not calm, is not quiet. Nors and Wright pull you in, and once you’re caught in their thrall, they tell about war and a warming planet, the landscape of memory, and the constant, fearsome pull of the ocean. “The sea is still not yours to play with,” Nors writes. “Your shipwreck is predictable, my friend.”
In each essay, Dorthe Nors-as-narrator drives up and down what she calls “the line” – the jagged, western edge of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula – to tell the varied, shifting stories of the coastal towns. She writes about an abbey that, at times, disappears; a buried chemical storage facility that will not stay hidden: “What’s buried here the sea takes back”; a midsummer’s eve bonfire, where people burn a “witch with stiff broomstick arms and a wild look in her felt-tip eyes”; and birds that migrate “as though the landscape were a readable language.” At times, I wanted Nors to go deeper (more about Denmark during and after WWII), but then remembered my own cultural bias. Perhaps what she’s getting at would be obvious to fellow Danes or anyone who didn’t attend an overstuffed American public school.
A Line in the World was inspired by Nors’ love of rural Jutland, and the pressure she has felt, since a young age, to live in the city if she wanted to “amount to anything.” In a recent essay for The New York Times, she writes, “So, I did. I educated and urbanized myself, and I did it even though all I ever really wanted, apart from love, was to have a house in a vast landscape. And to write.” In the book’s first essay, Nors links this fixation on city life to Denmark’s artistic and literary history, offering an argument for the book itself:
“It was a shift grounded in the past. In the Middle Ages, there was a strong centre of power in Viborg, in central Jutland, but the balance tipped towards Copenhagan, and it’s never the losers who get the chance to write history. In the eighteenth century, the golden age of Danish art, painters were exhorted to depict landscapes that defined what the real Denmark looked like. The nation’s true nature was to be found around Copenhagen, and it looked like a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, a Biedermeier idyll, bare of squalls, wilderness and drifting sands. If the harsh natural world at the periphery was described, it was mostly by the wasteland’s priests and parish clerks, who wrote educational tracts about the rows of dunes, about drainage and property rights.”
Nors then inverts the cliché of bustling city and quiet countryside by reminding readers of the incessant movement of the North Sea, capturing Jutland’s “wild and desolate” sensibility. “It is a living coastline made of sand,” Nors writes. “Always becoming, always dying.” Looking at a map, she acknowledges that the coast line is a construct, fixed in place by a mapmaker: “But if I could do what I wanted with time, if I could accelerate it like a piece of time-lapse footage where the roses turn from bud to blossom, the line would be alive. The drawing would always be moving.” I found these sentences so beautiful I had to read them aloud. Twice.
Even rarer than literature about rural Jutland, Nors writes, is documentation of “women’s relationships with the landscape. Their feeling for nature was at best irrelevant, at worst dangerous.” Nors claims this landscape as worthy of literature, claims nature writing for women. Fitting, then, that this also marks her first book translated into English by a woman, Caroline Waight. The women depicted in this book are vital, alive. In “Wadden Sea Suite,” Nors writes about Fanø, a matriarchy; the island’s culture developed with the men as shipmasters and sailors, away trading their goods. In “The Timeless,” Nors and her friend, the artist Signe Parkins (whose illustrations begin each essay), travel to churches along the coast to look at the frescoes painted within, “whimsical and instructive cartoons,” which both women agree have a timeless quality. The essay, at first, appears similarly whimsical and instructive.
Yet the way Nors writes from the outside in becomes more and more powerful as the essay progresses. She first gives the history of a place, followed by scenes of her friendship and a quick memory of her mother, who always wanted to be an artist. Nors often quotes Parkins, showing the reader the art through an artist’s eyes and allowing us to see what each painter cared most about “somewhere between five hundred and a thousand years ago.” In one church, Parkins notices the intricate folds on a dress: “He was pleased they let him paint her dress. This is a sheer labour of love. He’s sincere.” In this essay, as in all the others, the reality of the landscape soon invades: “We talked about going for a walk on the beach today, but the sand stings our faces and the salt sticks gluily to everything, including the windows of the car.” The way Nors layers historical detail, vivid scene, poignant memory, and the gritty landscape makes the essay rich and primes it for re-reading. The emotions, though sparse, are also precise and well-placed – a quick squeeze by a friend who insists she’s not a hugger.
Nors has a gift for figurative language, for linking people and nature: “People in black wetsuits, like cormorants in the cold, gently bobbing in the breakers.” And she writes a mean, enviable description of the sea: “The Wadden Sea is a living being with a big, damp lung.” Elsewhere: “The sea gnaws.” Her description of how the ocean erodes cliffs is my favorite: “The sea picks the meat off them, storm by storm.”
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I’ve been a Dorthe Nors fan since reading So Much for that Winter (2016), a pair of novellas translated by Misha Hoekstra. Nors writes formally inventive fiction in the present tense, filled with playful narrators and solid, straightforward sentences. There’s no throat-clearing in a Dorthe Nors book, no need to show off. The first line in So Much for that Winter is: “Minna introduces herself.” 2018’s Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, also translated by Hoekstra, is: “Sonja is sitting in a car, and she’s brought her dictionary along.” In her nonfiction, she also leans on clean, clear prose, but at times lets her sentences meander more, and this combination allows her essays to veer to the mystical, beautiful, and profound.
The novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space takes its form – a list of quick, declarative sentences – from Facebook status updates. (Remember those?) It’s a marvel how far Nors is able to roam within that constraint, how much of Minna’s desire and tedium and frustration she evokes. While reading A Line in the World, I found myself missing the more playful, structural invention I’ve come to associate with her work. I wondered about the placement of each essay, the book’s overall shape. Tracking the essays on the map, I saw no clear pattern emerge. Nors’s little Toyota, if the essays follow her itinerary, crisscrosses the land, starting in central west coast, driving north, then south, passing her original location, then further south, and finally all the way to the northern most point. Nors is a zigzagging Coltrane: “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” And perhaps this is her point. Literature about the natural world needn’t be controlled, but wild and meandering. Organic. Returning to the opening essay, I realize Nors-as-narrator has already made this point against formal invention: “I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.”
A Line in the World is the sort of essay collection that rewards pause. It’s possible to read in one swoop, as I did initially, drawn in by the cadence of her sentences and reading forward to discover how else this narrator would surprise me. In one delightful scene, she describes her love of popping a wave-smoothed piece of amber into her mouth. Read too quickly, however, the essays may feel repetitive. Her subject matter – the ocean, the Danish seasons, the moon – is of course cyclical, repetitive. “Gather, scatter.” Norwegian author Gunnhild Øyehaug – whose 2022 novel Present Tense Machine also shouldn’t be missed – calls Nors’s voice “hypnotic, consoling.” And that captures it perfectly: there’s a rhythmic, calming quality to this book. I plan to re-read it, one day, on a cold, desolate beach.
[Published by Graywolf Press on November 1, 2022, 240 pages, $16.00 paperback]
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