‘’Night has descended on Amager.
Denmark is laid in darkness.
The Sound flows softly.
The planes take off and land.
Minna awakens.
Minna gasps.’’

Two women find themselves in a limbo of losses, regrets and disappointment. The ones they used to trust have betrayed them, their world is shaking violently. The city is now harbouring their secrets, their souls as the struggle to remain afloat and sane begins…

Dorthe Nors composes another masterpiece with two unforgettable novellas, two elegies to womanhood and love, betrayal and survival, and an ode to the cities that offer us comfort and refuge.

‘’Amager Strandpark is Husby Danes meets
Omaha Beach.
Amager Strandpark is full of savage dogs
trying to flush something out.
Amager Strandpark is a battlefield of
wounded women.’’

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space

Minna’s heart breaks when her boyfriend sends her a text to break up with her. Still pining for that coward - because Love makes us weak, we have to admit as much…- she finds solace in Art. From Back to Bergman, from Karen Blixen to Hans Christian Andersen, Minna is staring at the void, wounded like a contemporary Little Mermaid, longing for the comfort of the Baltic Sea, lost in memories of past loves, in a city that tries to heal her wound. Ferocious like Fenris, her heart refuses to let go, fighting the demons. Written in headlines, poignantly commenting on the abhorrent Facebook culture and playing with strong motifs like the darkness and the urban vibe of a modern capital, Dorthe Nors creates a literary wonder. The final pages are simply striking.

‘’The ether is full of malicious messages.
The ether hums with breakups and loss.
The ether is knives being thrown.
The ether is blood surging back.’’

Days

‘’Why this now too? Hasn’t it been enough? Hasn’t
it?
I howled.’’

‘’that’s the way I am, not the kind you can knock
out,
with tongue before the mirror,
eyes open,
my face a grimace of gums and longing
and ice water for dinner.’’

What is Life if not a series of lists? Incidents, important or trivial, have the power to provoke any emotion, any reaction imaginable (and some less so…). In this novella, we follow a woman who tries to understand her needs and her own self while a rather peculiar spring unfolds around her. Finding refuge and tranquillity in the cemetery ‘’for now it is spring, and it’s tough to be happy’’, and with a shadowy Kali lurking in the corner, she passes from happiness to rage, from despair to hope in a very familiar and powerful roller-coaster of emotions. She is open to finding joy when light is seemingly lost, and her ability to make lists is what keeps her sane. Her clarity and observations are outstanding, and the ending notes of the Midsummer Night bonfires and the lawns were enough to warm a cold November’s night in Athens.

‘’got wet but didn’t care, for people who don’t
know how I feel should stop feeling for me, and if
they can’t think my thoughts to their conclusion,
they should think about something else, maybe
they should think about their own lives, and when
they think about them, they should ask themselves
if their lives make more sense.

and do they? I wondered
and walked home to Brahms
and the sounds down in the street.’’

Dear people, we are readers blessed with Dorthe Nors, superbly translated by Misha Hoekstra. All is well.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ ( )

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Dorthe Nors follows up her acclaimed story collection Karate Chop with a pair of novellas that playfully chart the aftermath of two very twenty-first century romances. In “Days,” a woman in her late thirties records her life in a series of lists, giving shape to the tumult of her days—one moment she is eating an apple, the next she is on the floor, howling like a dog. As the details accumulate, we experience with her the full range of emotions: anger, loneliness, regret, pain, and also joy, as the lists become a way to understand, connect to, and rebuild her life.

In “Minna Needs Rehearsal Space,” a novella told in headlines, an avant-garde musician is dumped via text message. Fleeing the indignity of the breakup, and friends who flaunt their achievements in life, career, and family, Minna unfriends people on Facebook, listens to Bach and reads Ingmar Bergman then decamps to an island near Sweden “well suited to mental catharsis.” A cheeky nod to the listicles and bulletins we scroll through on a daily basis, So Much for That Winter explores how we shape and understand experience, and the disconnection and dislocation that define our twenty-first-century lives, with Nors’s unique wit and humor.

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: How a perfectly rational North American running at full tilt towards the last full decade of his life is seduced by a Danish lady of middling vintage into going all experimental and experiential with his reading:

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space doesn't she. I think Minna's major problem is that she can't see or hear herself anymore. I think Minna needs about a year away from her surface-obsessed life to get back to what is underneath the headlines. Minna can't be arsed to try to move on from the indignity of being dumped via text message? What makes you so special, sunshine, that you're immune from the rage and outrage that accompanies any and all intermingling of XX and YX persons?

Even her career, avant-garde musician, tells you that she's been to Paradise but she's never been to me. Charlene whinged those words in 1977! I don't know Author Nors, but I'm sure that as she's a Dane she wasn't listening to US pop music in 1977. Maybe she should go back and fill in a blank in her world experience!

(In case it needs saying out loud, the above isn't meant to be serious but rather to point out how very different Author is from character...one deep and deadly, the other shallow and affectless.)

I know that A Public Space has always been deeply committed to women's writing, and I laud them for it. This translation is well inside their wheelhouse as Author Nors presents us with a tale that could only be told by a woman about a woman. Minna is a collection of headlines; Minna is without internal awareness; Minna has just been dumped via text message.

So why does Minna crash so heavily, so thoroughly massively, into a male brain.

Days gives us numbered lists of quotidian activities and thoughts, a step-by-step way to say "this is what life is: First this, then that, and don't ever stop because lists that end are thrown away."

10. Took in the bottle of wine the neighbor had placed on my mat:
11. Excuse the noise, Love, Majbritt, it said; so that's her name, I thought,
12. and set the bottle on top of the fridge,
13. moved it under the sink,
14. I'll drink it for Pentecost,
15. for Pentecost when I'm happy,
16. really happy.

The entire point of reading these lists, these discrete and atomized moments, is to understand that life, Life, isn't what we thought it was. It isn't a film. It's the filming script. It's the continuity book without the costume shots.

16. Chopped lettuce without cutting my finger
17. and decided that perhaps in time something good
would happen. I do know that something will, I know
it, like when you're riding a train across Zealand in
winter:
18. darkness darkness darkness darkness
19 and then suddenly a greenhouse crackling warm
20. in the middle of it all.

So why, you ask me, is this not poetry, what makes this prose, how arbitrary is the line, why do you insist you don't like poetry and this feels pretty much like poetry. You're telling me, I hear you thinking, you like this and you don't like poetry but WHY isn't this poetry.

All I can tell you without getting into formal discussions that I don't have the credentials for or interest in is that it's clearly the prose side of the Great Divide. I know lots of energy goes into the "debate" between poetry fans (the aggressors) and the poetry atheists (me) to establish that I am wrong and poetry is wonderful. So stipulated, your honors.

I still don't like poetry. I still like Dorthe Nors's prose. ( )

This book contains two novellas that were originally published before the novel Mirror, shoulder, signal, both also translated by Misha Hoekstra: Minna needs rehearsal space (2013) and Days (2010)

Disconcertingly, all three seem to be about almost the same central character, a single woman living in Copenhagen and doing some sort of solitary creative work (a composer in Minna, a translator in Mirror, unspecified but perhaps also a translator in Days). She misses the countryside of rural Jutland where she grew up and likes to sunbathe amongst the dead prime ministers in the Western Cemetery; she gets around Copenhagen on a bike; she's in a bad way emotionally, inter alia because she's recently been let down by a man.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't read all three - in other ways they are quite different. Whilst Mirror is a fairly conventional third-person narrative in form, the two novellas are both aggressively experimental, in ways that work surprisingly well. But must have been quite a challenge to the translator...

Minna is written entirely in one-sentence paragraphs, with an absolute minimum of grammatical complexity, like a children's reading primer. The idea is obviously partly to explore a kind of literary minimalism, expressing complex ideas in simple words, but it's clearly also exploiting the poetic effects that you can get by (for example) stripping out pronouns and hammering in the repetition of the nouns:

Amager steams with rain.
The rain refracts off the manholes.
Minna never bakes cake.
Minna gets up to bake a cake.
Minna bakes a cake in the middle of the night.
Cake is the opiate of the people.

Days, on the other hand, is written entirely in lists. The first-person narrator relentlessly records what she is doing and thinking about day-by-day, with each day's record set out as a new list. The prose often runs on from one list item to another, so there are in effect two competing time-signatures going on at once: the organic rhythm of the prose and the external organising beat of the list items. It's a curious effect, but a very striking one.

5. Took the bike to Damhus Pond, and it was when I had to brake by the bird-feeding area that I thought of my taxes
6. and then my accountant,
7. and then I biked home to my receipts,
8. crunched the numbers,
9. and This is a condition, I wrote at the bottom of a heating bill,
10. this is a way of being,
11. a change in the structure of existence

( )

This probably isn't the best Dorthe Nors to start with since it might leave the impression that she is a writer who uses gimmicks exclusively, which isn't the case. Aesthetically it makes sense to package these two novellas (one "made of headlines" and one "a series of lists") together, as U.S. publisher Graywolf Press has done, but UK publisher Pushkin Press provides a better overall view with Karate Chop & Minna Needs Rehearsal Space where the more standard short story formats of Karate Chop: Stories are combined with the "headlines" of "Minna Needs Rehearsal Space." So don't be misled by the formats here if you chance upon "So Much for That Winter" first.

Both of "Minna Needs Rehearsal Space" (I'll call it "Minna" from now on) and "Days" (where the first line is "So much for that winter.") can be seen as emulating the daily reading of many of the online community in the 21st century where often our social interactions consist of reading and commenting on Twitter or Facebook timelines or Instagram posts or mousing over click-bait factoids of "10 things you didn't know about celebrity/actor xyz" or "12 facts behind the scenes of the latest movie/tv-series". Much of "Minna" and "Days" could actually be read as a series of tweets as many entries don't exceed that medium's 140-character limit. So this may be experimental prose but it is in a format that many will find quite familiar and comfortable.

So there is a comfort in the medium, but there is an extra challenge to the writer to provide background, build character, create tension, provide drama and suspense and to finally provide resolution and a final release. The challenge to the reader is to decide how well that is all communicated to them with the minimalist means available.

"Minna" works with shorter statements but is more direct about its circumstances. You learn very early that composer Minna has broken up with her boyfriend Lars and that she is also in need of a rehearsal workspace. "Days" has longer entries, numbering usually 10 or 12 a day, that provide more exact detail of specific daily tasks and events. But the events behind the scenes are more obscure and require some guess work. Something has created a life-crisis for the nameless protagonist (but who has what seems to be an "evil-half" that she calls Kali, presumably named after the Hindu goddess) and it is likely something to do with a lost boyfriend who was perhaps in America. Both women embark on journeys to find their way forward. Minna's is a single train ride and that of Days consists of constant trips to cemeteries.

"Minna" is the easier and lighter story to follow here, but "Days" is more mysterious and intriguing and will probably reward several readings. I look forward to further Dorthe Nors and I was excited to see that her Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was on the 2017 International Booker longlist.

Bonus Track:
Speaking of Listicles and Factoids, here are
5 Reasons to go to Denmark by Dorthe Nors. (Feb. 23, 2017 posting, link still active as of March, 2017) ( )