Horror and comedy both require timing, and Dorthe Nors has it. The stories in her newly translated collection Karate Chop are less meditations on human savagery than riffs on it, understated monologues of everydayness through which the horror surfaces like a joke. Blink and you might miss the punch line ... her prose is direct, almost flat, a series of uncluttered and voice-driven sentences that achieve their rhythm through careful juxtaposition and build ... The occasional epiphany, when it occurs, is more likely to be ugly than uplifting ... Nors' free, indirect style leaves just enough room for the reader to distrust the character's perception of events ... the story turns itself inside-out — the title blow dealt to the reader as much as to any character ... In Nors' stories, narratives about why humans are the way they are dissolve before the simple fact that they are. This is, after all, one of the tenets of comedy, which is only interested in motives to the extent that they are ridiculous ... One hopes Nors' novels are translated into English soon.
The majority of them are dark and good, and a few stories are exceptional. In the better ones the reader is inserted into the middle of the story and the tone is casual, as if we already know the broader details ... Nors is adroit at offering powerful summation at the precise moment with a single cutting phrase or an unexpected observation ... surprising, subtle, and potent ... A few seem incomplete or have a style and tone that is in discord with the rest of the collection. But overall these brief realistic stories, as translated by Martin Aitken, provide universal insight into an everyday, modern existence. Readers might view a few as being very close to slice-of-a-life sketches, and that might be a fair criticism, although I wouldn’t necessarily judge it as a negative.
This gripping collection of short stories leaves you wanting more ... Dorthe Nors’ Karate Chop, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, contains 15 stories in 82 pages. The stories don’t feel minimalist – they’re full of life and ripe with death – but they’re brief because there is no fat on them ... Nors draws in the reader in a variety of ways. Some of her stories begin in an odd register ... Many of the stories have spot-on insight into how people package up their traumas and hide from themselves what hurts ... Nors has written four novels not yet translated into English. Oh! Don’t make us wait.
A collection of dark, bold, magnetic short stories from an original Danish voice ... a collection of brittle, blackly comic and quietly explosive stories that provide snapshots of modern Danish life and home in at daring angles to highlight the quirks, agonies and vulnerabilities of the human condition ... reads like a master class in compression, precision and economy of language ... Rather than plumb depths of emotion, she skates across surfaces, allowing cracks to form and disquiet to seep in ... The weaker tales are overshadowed by the many stronger ones. Almost all are steered by quirky, predominantly female characters, the frail and the gutsy.
Dorthe Nors illuminates an ominous world of disconnected people trying to make sense of their dislocation ... Nors’ affectless, matter-of-fact storytelling — crisply translated from the original Danish by Martin Aitken — is the perfect complement to the low-wattage desperation and inertia her characters feel, especially in the face of the opposite sex ... If Nors was to write these moments with any emotion at all, they would feel over the top. Instead, they register as sinister drones rather than a wail ... [Karate Chop] loves you and wants to teach you, but it also wants to harm you.
Nors presents a range of voices and offbeat images in these 15 unsettling and poetic stories. Some pieces, like one about a four-pound tomato, are oddly beautiful; others are brilliantly disturbing ... Nors follows pain down unusual paths ... What would be brief moments of interiority in another story make entire arcs here.
...precisely crafted and melancholy ... Melancholy is the theme across this collection, and it is melancholy of the deepest kind ... While Nors’s fondness for sadness might turn away some readers, there is no denying her sophistication and precision as a writer ... While the author’s balance of dark and light may render her work inaccessible to some readers, Karate Chop displays an admirable willingness to take on difficult stories, and Dorthe Nors tells these difficult stories very well.
...as sharp-edged, destructive, and intentionally made as the title suggests. Nowhere here is a word out of place. Imagine Grace Paley with more than a little of Mary Gaitskill’s keen eye for the despair and violence of sex, mixed with an otherness that’s unsettlingly odd and vivid. The sentences are brightly visual and attuned to the weird details of each character’s inner world ... Each of these pages contains a trapdoor, a side entrance, and, at times, they feel like dispatches from an alien world (or maybe the basement) ... a marvelous, truthful take on how these details illustrate our souls.
These stories are, in varying degrees, arresting ... Nors is just as mordant in her treatment of a self-aggrandizing charlatan who reinvents himself as a Buddhist to become head of an aid organization, which he then rips off ... These amuse-bouches are a fine introduction to the author's work.
