A LINE IN THE WORLD

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.