Dorthe Nors writes short fiction that is precise, brief and shattering ... Lyrical stream-of- consciousness prose is intercut with short, blunt sentences, enacting the push and pull of revelation between her protagonists and their environment. Misha Hoekstra’s translation delicately renders Nors’s intensity, along with her subtlety, by sticking to a straightforward and intentionally repetitive vocabulary. The almost standardized formula of Nors’s short fiction, more rigid here than in previous collections, can be frustrating, as we quickly begin to anticipate capricious plots and untrustworthy narrators. This is not, however, always to the detriment of Wild Swims . The twists here are often not conclusions but opportunities to look at matters slantwise; meanwhile, our expectations of narrative instability encourage close reading, and Nors frequently leaves statements open. In the absence of satisfying conclusions, such lines can be reinterpreted on each new reading, presenting wildly different possibilities.
Ranging from four to seven pages, the stories are small sips ending in dark rum punches ... Scenes capture feelings that elude a camera lens, unveiling inner motivations. Voices shift effectively, with some in first person, others in third. Most pieces convey remoteness, in landscape as well as character. Even in large cities there’s a bareness. People neither exude joy nor connect with one another. Nors teases at times with a cozy beginning, but eventually the murky underbelly emerges ... The twists Nors inserts veer toward the bleak yet encapsulate relatable emotions in sometimes witty ways ... Nors juggles adeptly, often keeping several story strands aloft and then abruptly walking away, leaving them suspended in midair, powerfully unresolved ... The Danes have long lauded Dorthe Nors, and the English-speaking world now understands why.
How slippery the work of the Danish writer Dorthe Nors is, how it sideswipes and gleams ... The stories are vivid the way a flash of immobilizing pain is vivid ... Perhaps because they’re so very short and because they mostly sketch slight interior shifts in her characters, Nors’s stories all feel a little bashful, a little tender. Surely this is intentional ... Most of her stories are too short to linger deeply in time or consciousness; the characters spin back into their silence almost as soon as they emerge on the page. Nors is a master at portraying female rage, but here there is also no violent explosion outward, instead a sort of inner collapse; her characters assiduously resist confronting their fury until it rises up against them and attacks their bodies ... The sense of simultaneous, furious upwelling into text and retraction into shame or reticence gives the stories a powerful undercurrent, as if they were constantly wrestling with themselves. Inherently self-contradicting, they wobble interestingly on their axes, pulled between outraged individualism and the restrictive Janteloven.
Nors’s stories progress in associations rather than drawing straight lines between narrative points ... Nors weaves such striking imagery throughout her stories, leaving us to intuitively make sense of how everything fits together ... Occasionally [Nors] pulls back a bit, challenging herself to write a more naturalistic story a la Raymond Carver, where events unfold in linear order and the prose calls less attention to itself ... Nors’s deft touch gives rise to her unusual way of structuring her stories; in the hands of a less refined prose writer, it would all seem a mishmash ... [Nors's] work is engaging on multiple levels. One hopes, then, that the author’s influence can spread far and wide. Some younger North American and European writers, such as Nicolette Polek and Katharina Volckmer, have lately joined the small-book tradition, and if the 2020s bring a rise in the popularity of small books, it will be a trend worth celebrating.
Dorthe Nors’s new collection of stories, previously published in her native Denmark and the UK, appears in the United States in the midst of the pandemic winter. To some, the stories may seem perfect for the moment; others may find the collection too dark a reflection of current isolation, rupture, and loneliness. Reader, beware ... The pressing conflict in these stories is internal, intrapersonal. Streaming parallel narratives of thought, recollection, and observation reveal snatches of the present and partial, allusive glimpses of determinative past events and interactions ... Nors is an innovator ... Reading these stories at times feels almost like complicit voyeurism—witnessing pain through a one-way mirror in the laboratory of Nors’s world.
A new collection by the Danish writer, showcases her ability to use narrative blank spots and unresolved situations as devices to lure readers into her work ... One of the great joys of oral storytelling is the intimacy often forged between a talented speaker and an audience, which can transform any room into a two-person confessional, a late-night phone call, or a conversation with the stranger at the nearest barstool. I’ve been thinking about this kind of intimacy while reading and rereading Wild Swims ... Nors mixes first and third person perspectives, luring the reader with an intimate tone and a masterful handling of pace and plot construction. The result is a collection reminiscent of a magnetic speaker standing at a microphone, enthralling her audience while sharing a secret ... Yet is this a true intimacy, or are Nors’ deceptions merely crafted to mimic such connections? After all, a shared frame of reference may be impossible to establish when discussing fiction, itself a form based on the creativity of the lone storyteller ... Her commitment to leaving space for the reader to become part of the story creates its own sense of pleasure. There is never a point where her technique begins to show its seams, or where the author doesn’t craft with a sense of closeness, true or fabricated, toward her audience. These stories may be short in length, yet they all possess an abundance of depth.
... the 14 stories in the book are mesmerizing, addictive. Each one is just a few pages, written in an oblique, poetic style that arrives at its conclusion through indirection ... Nors has an uncanny ability to capture the way the human mind works, with disparate memories and ideas running simultaneously along different tracks ... captivating stories.
Nors demonstrates her unique power to disturb with the vaguest of details ... These truly are short stories. No tale exceeds seven pages. Some amount to mere sketches, snapshots or portraits. Many are fuelled by strange thoughts and idiosyncratic deeds. A few are maddeningly evasive and raise more questions than answers. And yet all are masterclasses in concision and most get straight to the nub of the matter, able to perfectly convey a mood, encapsulate an emotion or dramatise a predicament. Nors has described her stories as 'hit-and-run-literature', which aptly sums them up: she gets in there, does her thing, then gets out, often leaving us marvelling at her dexterity ... We also admire Nors’ prose, which is rich with quirky formulations and novel comparisons ... Sharp, inventive, and consistently captivating, Nors’ tales are miniature wonders. Prepare to see the world in a refreshing new light.
The short stories of the contemporary Danish author Dorthe Nors are a masterclass in minimalism — and an opportunity to ponder what remains in texts so stripped bare. Never longer than a few pages, her works are sleek and compressed, and in them characters play hide and seek with fragments of their personhood, like shadowy figures in a darkened place, illuminated now and then by the flash of a lightning bolt ... The collection has the feeling of homecoming: Nors is at her strongest working within the clean lines of short paragraphs and simple sentences, minimalism as we know it best ... provides readers with greater access to interiority than anything by Carver, and to a wider variety of lives and experiences. But minimalism can be a fascinating way to parse an author’s priorities, or even speculate on the collective moods and identities that undergird them ... Like Carver’s, Nors’s style is, in a manner of speaking, dirty realism about her homeland ... Memories and perturbations strengthen a story that would otherwise be uneventful, simply the act of taking a few laps. But the threat of death, of drowning, of late-season hunters, animates the mundane in Nors’s fiction, even pushing it to the point of combustion at the moment the curtains fall.
She’s a deceptively spare kind of writer, is Dorthe Nors ... Nors is not interested in resolutions. Her stories eddy rather than build, unfurling in multiple directions at once. Nothing happens. Everything happens. Often in a singularly resonant way ... If this gives the impression that Nors’s stories are lenten or whimsical (or both), it shouldn’t. At their best they are sharp, affecting, splendidly atmospheric, sometimes funny. They are also brilliantly written. Nors’s conjunction of tenuously related clauses elegantly captures the strange workings of associative cognition, while her characters’ ostensibly workaday thoughts are transformed into glistening gems of fecundity ... There are infelicities. Nors occasionally uses bloodless phrases and her predilection for gnomically portentous endings can feel formulaic. But these are minor complaints. Wild Swims is an enchanting work whose brief, almost fugitive stories achieve multitudes in a gesture. Maximalism does not require copiousness.
Dorthe Nors’ Wild Swims is a collection of 14 short stories written tightly and tensely, with most under a thousand words. They begin mundanely, with lean, thrifty sentences. No repetition. Not much waste ... And so it begins ... Scene set, the fun will soon begin, in this case, with clues for tension, details to pull you into the tale and make you care ... And then, a shift, darker and Danishly so, just in case, just before you decide there’s nothing to see here and move on ... Meaning and moments expertly burrowed under sentences so clean you thought they were transparent, until meaning is conveyed from under them and you are surprised, moved, lifted ... Enter Misha Hoekstra, who succeeds here at translating the (classical overture?) soundtrack of Wild Swims. Thanks to her, its melody remains true and travels and captures and satisfies and maintains the elegance of Nors’ previous work ... these stories fish us, pull us out of sweet water, sometimes gasping for air. Read together, they are addictive ...
In this masterful collection of stories, Danish writer Nors presents the lives of melancholy characters all yearning for something more meaningful ... Translated by Hoekstra, Nors weaves these somber tales of longing and disappointments with humor and bits of hope. She dives right into the heart of her stories with emotion and insight, making this a delightful collection that can easily be read in one sitting.
Cool, razor-sharp stories by a brilliant Danish writer ... Irony and narrative sleights of hand (like the precisely planted out-of-place word, an obsessive thought that gets whittled down to its shameful source, the swerve of an unexpected final line) shape-shift these beautiful distilled stories. You think you know what you’re reading until suddenly you don’t. A brainy collection perfectly constructed to put you on edge.
Danish writer Nors’s sensuous experimental collection offers an ethereal tour through ordinary places made strange and eerie. A bare-bones plot and rich, hypnotic prose ... Nors provides no clear arcs or answers, leaving the reader to contemplate ideas of perception versus objective reality as sentences cut like switchbacks on trails to mysterious destinations. Throughout, remarkable characters and wonderful lines emerge from the artful prose. This is worth downing in one sitting.
