Review by Booklist Review
In this masterful collection of stories, Danish writer Nors (Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, 2015) presents the lives of melancholy characters all yearning for something more meaningful. A man with an injured ankle reminisces about his wife's controlling attitude and his inability to stand up for himself and his own family members. A writer travels to a cabin in Norway where she befriends her ex-boyfriend's parents. A pair of friends knock on doors to collect money for a fabricated charity on a whim, while one of them broods on her ungenuine love. A woman finds herself trying to fill the feeling of emptiness that surrounds her with happy fairground fantasies. A young woman is inspired by the idea of wild swims, but finds it difficult to swim in a public pool. Translated by Hoekstra, Nors weaves these somber tales of longing and disappointments with humor and bits of hope. She dives right into the heart of her stories with emotion and insight, making this a delightful collection that can easily be read in one sitting.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Danish writer Nors's sensuous experimental collection (after Mirror, Shoulder, Signal) offers an ethereal tour through ordinary places made strange and eerie. A bare-bones plot and rich, hypnotic prose sketch a portrait of a man hiding out from his wife on a hunting platform ("In a Deer Stand"). Two women's door-to-door fund-raising drive for the Cancer Society turns into a darkly ironic nightmare in "By Sydvest Station," after they encounter a sickly woman whose hair is falling out. Nors provides no clear arcs or answers, leaving the reader to contemplate ideas of perception versus objective reality as sentences cut like switchbacks on trails to mysterious destinations. In "Hygge," the title of which refers to the Danish art of coziness, the narrative is anything but: "It was as if something dead had taken up permanent residence in her cells." The surreal title story involves the narrator's trip to a local swimming pool ("It surprised me that my birthmark was still there, and still looked like the island of Anholt seen from the air"). Throughout, remarkable characters and wonderful lines emerge from the artful prose. This is worth downing in one sitting. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Cool, razor-sharp stories by a brilliant Danish writer. Several years ago, you couldn't open a magazine without reading about hygge, a Danish word meaning a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that supposedly defines Danish life. And yet there is little cozy about Nors' new collection, not even in a story called "Hygge," an icy account of everything that's tacky and desperate about Lilly, the middle-aged woman the narrator is dating: "She doesn't feel anything, most of the time," the man observes, "but it takes nothing at all to make her feel everything." Of course, as he excoriates her, he reveals just what a cruel misogynist he is. Irony and narrative sleights of hand (like the precisely planted out-of-place word, an obsessive thought that gets whittled down to its shameful source, the swerve of an unexpected final line) shape-shift these beautiful distilled stories. You think you know what you're reading until suddenly you don't. In "In A Deer Stand," a man drives into the country to get away from his wife, though it's not just she whom he's fleeing, and the narrator in "Manitoba" plots his escape to a hunting cabin when a group of noisy teenagers pitches their camp next to his house. But the real reason for his flight, alluded to in fleeting images, is more sinister. Finally, in "By Sydvest Station," Lina and her friend go door to door, pretending to raise money for the Cancer Society, while she unselfconsciously wonders how her boyfriend could accuse her of faking love. Nors, whose novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, drills down into the idea that people can't really understand themselves, let alone others. A brainy collection perfectly constructed to put you on edge. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
