Of course we sympathize with them in their tribulations-the characters are angels, after all-but the sadness is softened by our understanding that, when the brunt of the distress wears off, they will still find themselves in heaven.
Perhaps it’s the particular exhaustion of being an American at this time, but reading a Nors book is like reading about the heartbreak of angels. A huge chunk of my first novel’s advance went to an emergency C-section, and I have what passes in the United States as excellent health insurance. Even in good times, the American safety net is riddled with holes. To have the luxury of freedom from the corrosive acid of financial worries! In the middle of this endless-seeming pandemic, in which half the United States has demonstrated they don’t give a whit if millions of people die, I cannot stop wondering what it might feel like to exist in a world of such relative collective care. She does not fret about bankrupting herself with hospital fees when, in the book’s culminating set piece, she slips on a rock, conks her head, and almost drowns before painfully pulling herself, dazzled and woozy, from the sea. After the journalist Lars dumps her, she can nurse her woe without succumbing to money angst she can moon about, reading Ingmar Bergman’s books, bicycling through Copenhagen, eating cake, failing to write her paper sonata, failing to text her overbearing sister back, failing to be a good friend, failing even in her attempt to take a working vacation to an island called Bornholm.īecause failure is the privilege of the secure, and because there is no evidence of Minna having family money or prodigious fiscal savvy, her art, one begins to suspect, has been subsidized by the state. In most places in the world, being a tad avant-garde as an artist is tantamount to being penniless, but Minna apparently needs no other job than composing her soundless music. Minna spends her days in the Royal Library.
Turning page sleeping at last songs like it series#
The story, which is written in single-sentence paragraphs like a series of short status updates on Facebook or staff lines in a musical score, begins: One can feel a taut safety net strung under the lovelorn Minna in the most joyous and experimental of Nors’s works, the novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, collected in So Much for That Winter. The relatively hygge nature of their loneliness is a result-at least it seems to me, a capitalism-poisoned American-of a gentle Danish socialism. Nors’s characters are nearly all materially comfortable yet spiritually lonely. Scandi noir-the bloody, moody work of writers like Stieg Larsson or Henning Mankell-is, as a genre, the antithesis of her foggy and playful and slightly chilly stories. If there are murders in her books, they are only seen indirectly, as fiction, like the ones in the grisly Swedish crime novels that Sonja, the protagonist of Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, translates for a living. What happens-the events that take place, the plots-is much less important than the delicate traces of emotion that drift through her characters. Nors’s fictional world is a world of conflicts gentler than those that animate most contemporary literature. Certain moments slide forward briefly, diffidently, to show themselves, before hiding: characters walk again and again in cemeteries, sing folk songs in the direction of the sea, ride ferries and horses and bicycles, wear yellow clogs, read books, drink takeout coffee, slowly topple over with vertigo. As with music, I can hold only small strands of Nors’s work in my mind at a time, while the whole composition eludes my grasp. When I consider her four books translated into English-two story collections, a pair of novellas, one novel-I think of music. How slippery the work of the Danish writer Dorthe Nors is, how it sideswipes and gleams.
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