Publishers Weekly
08/15/2022
Danish novelist Nors (Mirror, Shoulder, Signal) makes her first foray into nonfiction with this poetic chronicle of her time spent along Denmark’s North Sea coast. The rugged and ever-shifting coastline, which Nors paints as harsh and unforgiving but not without beauty, has “been a part of me from the beginning,” she writes in “The Line”—it’s where her family is from, and where she owns a house. “Amsterdam, Hvide Sande” shows how “living with the water and off the water takes arrogance and submission at the same time.” “West by Water” reflects on the WWII land mines that, until “well into” Nors’s lifetime, were buried off the coast, while “The Secret Place” describes the industrial waste that contaminated the area around her family’s summer home. One of the most memorable entries is “The Timeless,” which sees Nors and her friend Signe Parkins (whose illustrations adorn the opening of each chapter) explore frescoes in coastal churches; when asked at one church if they’re there to see the paintings, Nors answers, “We’re on a kind of quest for things that transcend time.” Nors’s portrait of her connection to a landscape both “harsh and mild” enchants. Illus. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
[A] luminous set of reflections. . . . An intricate reckoning with a world that, despite our best attempts to tame it, remains elemental and wild.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A Line in the World is . . . one of the first books to capture the unique region in English. In prose that is as sparse and quiet as the marshy Jutland peninsula itself, the book provides a snapshot of life in a location that is full of history and at the same time ever-shifting, its future uncertain.”—Courtney Tenz, The Washington Post
An immediacy and an intimacy filter through [Nors's] spare, brilliant prose about the region’s history, shipwrecks and other stories. The reader becomes immersed in Nors’s interior weather as well as the harsh external elements of the rugged Jutland Peninsula.”—S. Kirk Walsh, New York Times Book Review
“Ms. Nors is ever on the hunt for the secret seams of passion—whether from terror or jubilation—beneath the stark surface of the land and behind the faces of its button-lipped inhabitants. . . . The tone here, in Caroline Waight’s translation, is gentle and considered. It has clearly been [Nors’s] intention to avoid both tourist gawking and big-city condescension, and the result is both revealing and respectful. . . . Beautiful.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“A revelation. In 14 eloquent, observant essays that combine journalism, nature writing and memoir, Nors paints a vivid portrait of a remote and rugged territory whose striking scenery masks more than its share of dangers. . . . A Line in the World will appeal to a wide audience of discerning and curious readers.”—Shelf Awareness
“Languorous and evocative. . . . The dramas of the past are evoked not so much through individual characters as through their traces—buildings, ruins, shipwrecks . . . ancient landscapes steeped in myth. . . . Nature is at the heart of this beautiful book.”—Claire Messud, Harper's
“The tight bond between place and people forms the backbone of this evocative and haunting book, which reminds the reader at every turn that permanence is not promised.”—Booklist
“A masterpiece of place-based nonfiction. . . . Nors claims this landscape as worthy of literature, claims nature writing for women.”—Nichole LeFebvre, On the Seawall
“[Nors] orients herself among dust and dirt, sea and sand, brilliantly capturing specks of memories which dance in the light, however briefly. Like W.G. Sebald’s narrator in The Emigrants, who watches dust dance in the projector light, Nors documents how the past haunts the present.”—Elizabeth McNeill, Chicago Review of Books
“In this rather unusual collection, which intertwines subjects as disparate as Viking history, modern surfing, and ancient church frescoes, Nors has written a powerful, authoritative masterpiece.”—Laura Albritton, Harvard Review
“Each essay offers an exquisite, layered exploration of a different stretch of that wild North Sea coast. . . . A Line in the World is no ordinary travel memoir, and its line connects the stories of each place like living tissue. Nors observes what others would not, mixing memory, history, nature, culture, and journalism in a deeply personal exploration of Danish geography.”—Samantha Siefert, Asymptote
“[A] poetic chronicle of her time spent along Denmark’s North Sea coast. . . . Nors’s portrait of her connection to a landscape both ‘harsh and mild’ enchants.”—Publishers Weekly
“A stunning portrayal of the connection between landscape, human beings, and memory on the Danish west coast...[Nors’s] rhythm, her stillness, her humility...This is a master piece.”—DAGBLADET INFORMATION
“Dorthe Nors is one of those rare authors—like Sebald—who can bring a place to the page so that you forget the outside world while reading. And there are lines of such astonishing beauty in this book that I find myself circling back to them like landmarks in their own right.”—Tanya Shadrick
“Dorthe Nors’s first nonfiction draws a beautiful, delicate line into which swims time, space, place, borders and what it means to belong. A deep dive into a coastal landscape, both breathtaking and hypnotic, it is a journey towards your own heart and what it means to truly belong.”—Natasha Carthew, author of Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience
“These masterful essays give a strong, personal, and moving portrait of a landscape and of a mind—about loneliness, memory and belonging, in wind and waves, time, place. The light flowing through Nors’s writing is breathtaking; it is hypnotic, consoling.”—Gunnhild Øyehaug, author of Present Tense Machine
“A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast. In Dorthe Nors’s deft hands, the sea is no longer a negative space, but a character in its own right. I loved it.”—Katherine May, author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“A Line in the World is starkly, achingly beautiful. With stunning intimacy and precision—as attentive to tiny details in nature as she is to vast cloudless skies—Dorthe Nors shows us how places and their histories shape who we are and how we find home.”—Jessica J. Lee, author of Turning and Two Trees Make a Forest
“Lyrical, luminescent, and yet rigorously concrete, Dorthe Nors’s keen understanding of the intricacies of place and the tensions inherent in attachment make the Danish coast come to life. I loved seeing this landscape through her eyes, but most of all I loved the inheritance of observation, experience, and beauty contained within this volume.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
“You need real nerve to gaze unfaltering at the sea, and to walk untremblingly along the high creaking edges of the land, and life, and ideas. Nors is one of the very rare writers with that nerve, and it is spectacularly displayed in this taut, uncompromising, glittering book. Most of us are dangerously content with the appearance of things. If that's you, don't read this book, which cuts straight to the heart.”—Charles Foster, author of A Little Brown Sea and Being a Beast
“Dorthe Nors’s writing is both poetic and harsh, laconic and ironic... Her prose makes its way into the landscape and the soul.”—KRISTELIGT DAGBLAD
“[Nors’s] unreserved love for the coastal landscape is the engine that drives the text forward...There is a seductive intimacy at stake in these encounters with nature.”—MORGENBLADET
“This is not a book: it is magic, like wandering in the mind of somebody in love. Dorthe Nors loves the coast of the North Sea and the Wadden Sea, it is her land, and her beautifully exact writing seems simple until you smell the salt and seaweed; then you know she’s taken you there. She tells the stories of fisher widows, storm and surge, seals as beings parallel to humans, even the glamorous surfers of Cold Hawaii. It must be true love because she can play with everything she so sharply observes and make it sometimes funny, sometimes chilling, always involving. This a wonderful holiday in a very fine writer’s heart.”—Michael Pye, author of The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us
“A Line in the World is less a collection of essays than a confluence of eons, of feeling, of inarticulable precision—and it pulled me under. Dorthe Nors writes with the cool might of the North Atlantic tide, coasting from naval hubris and a dwindling, seaside matriarchy to geological phenomena and modern displacement. Such scope and focus is a feat, an occurrence of those poignant, silty histories which only an artist of Nors's caliber can catch.”—Jakob Guanzon, author of Abundance
Library Journal
11/01/2022
Novelist and Man Booker finalist Nors (Mirror, Shoulder, Signal) muses on divergent, intertwined aspects of landscapes and life along the North Sea, from the west coast of Denmark, south to Germany and the Netherlands. From the region's past and present, mostly around Jutland, Denmark, there are also vignettes and tales about its people, homes, lighthouses, church frescoes, dunes, and walking paths, along with explanations about how storm surges and the sea always prevails. Nors connects her own childhood experiences and her current transient life in the region to view the culture as an insider and outsider. Most stories, ranging from a chemical plant that causes irreparable damage to a seemingly vanishing abbey, migratory birds, and the surfing scene, traverse time and tie back to the present through the coast. Black-and-white drawings by Signe Parkins bring out the harshness of the landscape. VERDICT Inquisitive and flowing, with plenty of insight into how North Sea cultures adapt and respond to the sea. More than a travelogue, with stories about life, death, and nature as an enduring, immovable, ever-changing force.—Zebulin Evelhoch
NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile
Ann Richardson sounds natural and relaxed as she delivers myriad Danish place names and words as Dorthe Nors ventures up and down the coast of Denmark. But this isn't a warm travel memoir. It's windy and cold and tinged with menace and risk. Nors visits church frescoes, isolated lighthouses, bonfires with burning witches' effigies, shipwrecks, and chemical plants--there is no hint of hygge here. Richardson excels at conveying the wildness of North Sea storm surges pounding the coast and washing away landmarks, burial grounds, and even whole towns. At times, it's a somewhat difficult listen. Nors jumps around in time and space, and Richardson doesn't give clear signals that we're moving on, so it's easy to get lost for a bit. A.B. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-08-23
The first book of nonfiction from the iconoclastic Danish author.
In this graceful, lyrical text, Nors gathers 14 essays about the North Sea Coast of Denmark, which is, for her, both legacy and landscape. “That was where our kin came from; the coastline was our place of origin,” she writes in the first of the deft and offhand pieces. “My family had a little house tucked away in a deserted backwater out there all my life.” If this statement makes her efforts seem like a reclamation, there is plenty of disruption, as well. The author sees the coast as not only geographic, but also personal. “A landscape is beyond the telling, like the telling is beyond itself,” she writes. “It takes a person to take up the line somewhere, to open, look and make a cut.” That is her purpose in this luminous set of reflections, which she frames as something of an escape: “Me, my notebook, and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life.” As the book progresses, Nors touches on a variety of intriguing rituals and landmarks—e.g., the Midsummer’s Eve bonfire, in which a doll is burned to ward off evil; a tour of coastal churches undertaken in one day. “We Danes,” she writes, “are more or less in agreement: all of this is a game we play.” Still, those ancient places and ceremonies exert a vivid pull. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent then when she addresses weather patterns, the storm surges, “part of the organic, changeable and violent life of the coast,” that have wreaked havoc on inhabitants for centuries. “It’s always out there, the great storm surge,” she writes. “You know it’s coming.”
An intricate reckoning with a world that, despite our best attempts to tame it, remains elemental and wild.
