So Much for That Winter

April 18, 2016
These two experimental novellas from Nors (Karate Chop) follow artists through personal and aesthetic crises after breakups. The first, “Minna Needs Rehearsal Space,” shows Nors’s economy and perceptiveness, and outshines the second, “Days.” Minna is a Copenhagen avant-garde composer working on a sonata of tonal rows, the rules of which the author mirrors in syntax: repetition, inversion, and reordering of a limited set. The resulting “see Spot run” style would be merely cutesy in less talented hands. Minna is “in many ways desperate,” recently dumped via text and at odds with the women in her life. Coffee with Jette, a harpist who dates married men, agitates Minna’s professional and romantic anxieties. Karin, happy in the hinterlands, “brags about motocross, sex, and pork sausage.” Their email volleys exemplify the story’s dry humor. Minna learns of her mother’s disappointment at her childlessness through her blog. Her domineering sister hounds her all the way to a Baltic island, where Minna finally outruns cell phone service and the reader is treated to a cathartic and suspenseful climax. This rich social world is almost entirely absent from “Days,” a sort of diary burdened with inscrutable line-numbering. Here, the pang of romantic loss is squelched by vagueness, and the self-absorbed writer protagonist insists on sharing her melodramatic appreciations of graveyards. Fortunately, Nors’s fine-grained renderings of ordinary moments periodically zap the world back to life.

April 15, 2016
These two novellas present an edgy evocation of contemporary life. Nors is a creator of small spaces; her fiction is relentless, edgy, brief. The Danish writer's collection Karate Chop (2014) gathered 15 stories in 88 pages: work marked by sudden turns through which characters must come to grips with the unexamined assumptions of their lives. Nors aspires to something similar with her new book, which brings together a pair of novellas, although we may as well call them extended prose poems. In the first, Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, she uses short declarative sentences--each framed as a single paragraph--to tell the story of a composer who desires nothing more than a kind of lasting silence, while the second, Days, comes framed as a succession of lists. The idea is to deconstruct, or rewire, narrative by stripping away excess detail in favor of something closer to pure consciousness. Yet lest this sound off-putting or difficult, it couldn't be more accessible. The key is Nors' specificity, which roots us in the lives she reveals. "Minna walks around among ordinary people," she writes. "Ordinary people cheat on their taxes. / Ordinary people go to swinger clubs. / Ordinary people flee the scene of the crime." What Nors is after is the peculiar anomie of contemporary living, in which despite being constantly in touch with one another, we have never been further apart. As a consequence, we are often disconnected, separated by distances that seem impossible to bridge. All that's left to us are the smallest details, which become the lens through which we reckon with ourselves. "1. Woke an hour early," explains the narrator of Days. "2. made instant coffee, / 3. drank it, / 4. stood by my kitchen window the same way I stood by my kitchen window when I lived on the island of Fan and went down to the beach every day and crushed razor shells underfoot: Why do I live here? I'd wondered / 5. and couldn't have known that one day I would stand in a flat in Valby and look at the crooked tulips in the backyard and wonder the same thing." In these novellas, people never really know each other, which means they must take their consolations where they can.

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