Nors’ writing is by turns witty, gut wrenching, stark and lyrical. Her characters seesaw between longing for human connection and the space in which to lick their wounds. That she achieves all this while experimenting with form is something of an impossible feat...Two riffs on a shared theme, these novellas do invite comparison to one another, but they bolster one another too. Paired as a single volume, Nors has created an exciting and artful literary diptych.
Getting dumped: It happens to everyone. But when it happens to you, the agony seems unique in the annals of suffering. Danish writer Dorthe Nors covers the emotional spectrum of the experience in the two playfully experimental novellas of So Much for That Winter, finding as much material in the comedy of rejection as in its humiliations and heartbreak...The delightful 'Minna Needs Rehearsal Space' begins as a young Copenhagen composer is dropped by her boyfriend via text message in favor of a sexy pop musician...It’s here that Ms. Nors’s impish wit stands out.
Nors is plainly taking on the tight emotional space of the digital and attempting to do what she always does: zap it with lightning to make it grow bigger. The first novella, titled 'Minna Needs Rehearsal Space,' is written in 'headlines.' I’ll confess now that I don’t entirely understand what that means, but the single line units that form the story resemble something like blog titles or status updates. In their declarative nature, too, they resist description (in a way not unlike the sentences and stories of Diane Williams), but it helps that the protagonist, Minna, has a coherent inner life, and that minor characters emerge...It’s the second, succinctly-titled novella, 'Days,' that opened my eyes to the radicality of what Nors is doing.
As in Woolf, the beauty of the world in the face of death and decay is very much at stake in So Much for That Winter. That, combined with its repetitions and confessions, gives the book a devotional quality. It's easy to imagine this duo of airy novellas slipped into the purse or beach bag of one of those women who feel invisible, who will perhaps read it slowly on a park bench and be inspired to sing a little louder, take up a little more space, or write a little more freely.
So Much for That Winter is not only about our hyperconnected yet atomized times but ingeniously of them as well. The novellas are daring formal experiments that simultaneously evoke and critique the feeling of online life ... Her cyber-inspired forms look and feel on the page like narrative poetry, and her small epics insist that our efforts to find happiness and make art—even in the bleary, dulling space of the internet—remain as urgently beautiful as ever ... It’s reflective of Nors’ style that the ecstatic and creative emerge, drolly and yet vividly, from the quotidian. She captures the sense of alienation that pervades her characters’ worlds.
Thinking about the formal patterns of the novellas, I surmise that the monotone of the first is meant to evoke the daily and often tedious experience of suffering, while the second reduces a life to a to-do list, not of chores and obligations per se, but the daily experience of living and acting (or not acting), grinding out the mostly ordinary days. But the stylization does nothing much for the experience. The characters’ tedium shouldn’t translate to ours. Given that these two women lead middle-class, uneventful lives, a little more stylistic pizazz would have relieved my frequent boredom.
[So Much for That Winter] (masterfully translated by Misha Hoekstra) collects two novellas that use the conceit of their structures to question the reliability of structure itself ... While 'Minna Needs Rehearsal Space' is funny and accessible, the second, shorter novella, 'Days,' is a quieter, more introverted rumination on loss that doesn’t sweat its occasional inscrutability ... Nors is a wholly unique voice in contemporary literature: a maximalist working within minimalist forms, hammering her prose into those shapes that will better amplify its power. The work suggests effortlessness and a lack of constraint, even as it hews to an almost skeletal simplicity. With these novellas, Nors replicates the modular nature of existence, line following line, day following day.
