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Karateslag / Minna zoekt oefenruimte
Even complex als het leven zelf zijn de schitterende verhalen van Dorthe Nors. Of ze nu schrijft over een gigantische tomaat, tamme reigers of vrouwelijke moordenaars, met haar buitengewoon originele stem en scherpe oog voor detail dringt ze diep door in de menselijke geest. Snel en raak als een karateslag.
In de bezwerende poëtische novelle Minna zoekt oefenruimte onderzoekt Nors op uiterst originele en speelse wijze onze worsteling met liefde en relaties.
In de bezwerende poëtische novelle Minna zoekt oefenruimte onderzoekt Nors op uiterst originele en speelse wijze onze worsteling met liefde en relaties.
164 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 26, 2015
7 people are currently reading
202 people want to read
About the author
Dorthe Nors
38 books254 followersDorthe Nors is a Danish author and writer. She is the first Danish author to be published in the American magazine The New Yorker. She was born in 1970 and studied literature and art history at the University of Aarhus. After publishing three novels, she wrote Karate Chop, her collection of short stories, in 2008 and Minna Needs Rehearsal Space in 2013. She has seen her short stories in various publications, including The Boston Review, Harpers and The New Yorker, and has contributed to anthologies in Denmark and Germany. Having international acclaim, she lives in rural Jutland, Denmark.
From http://pushkinpress.com/author/dorthe...
From http://pushkinpress.com/author/dorthe...
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 30, 2016
I'm not usually a big fan of short story collections - but this -
Karate Chop
[4.5] - is one of the exceptions. (Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, in the same volume, is a great little novella that could be described as experimental-lite.) The stories' subjects, summarised, sound like typical litfic short story fodder, yet I found these pieces far more interesting; I am not entirely sure why, but something to do with all the Danish cultural and geographical detail; the unselfconscious writing about people from a variety of class backgrounds (not just whatever is the Copenhagen equivalent of Hampstead); an unembarrassed directness where yr typical Anglo short story is oblique and hinty; they are strange without making a fuss of the mildly sinister; and rather than being brittle (one of my favourite words for that usual type of story), these feel solid enough that if you threw them at the floor, they'd be just fine.
Apparently I think picnicware makes better fiction than bone china.
The weakest point, IMO, was 'Mother, Grandmother and Aunt Ellen'; in a lot of story collections I might have found this one of the more interesting, due to a handful of particular details, but in this exceptionally strong selection it lacked the strangeness and urgency that made me sit up and take notice of the others.
Among my favourites for topics alone were 'The Buddhist', which is kind of about the contemporary corporate / egotistical ways Buddhism is used, and 'The Heron' in which a peculiar individual discusses birds and other things in the Frederiksberg Gardens park: I found myself snorting with laughter at phrases like There are problems at the end of the park where the alcoholics sit, particularly with ducks, or the way herons never really muster the enthusiasm, before things became somewhat darker.
A couple of forays to New York go rather well: the Latina maid of a wealthy Danish expat couple has to deal with a bizarre unsatisfactory item from their online supermarket shop, (I also liked the unexpected detail that the laundrette was run by Albanians). Then a sociology professor narrates the strikingly unsentimentalised tale of a down-and-out disabled man who frequented a McDonalds near his work. It isn't syrupy, or philosophical, or overtly sociopathic enough to sound like American fiction about such a character, and this juxtaposition with the setting was rather fascinating.
Several of the stories give that sense that in Denmark - and other Nordic countries - the default expectation for women is of something stronger, more independent and less docile than the implied history in Anglo fiction & films (and as with various Scandinavian TV series, my family background leads me to feel more at home in these works, which make infinitely more sense to me than the generalisations women make about other women in most English-language novels). It comes across quite subtly in relationship-focused stories like 'Do You Know Jussi?', which somehow carry a stronger sense of personhood, less meekness. In 'Karate Chop', the intriguing narrative of a woman who ends up in abusive relationships whilst her professional background should enable her to recognise them, it is clear that bad things can still happen. The exploration of thought processes has a non-dogmatic clarity more akin to very well-written psychology than to the righteous tumult I'm accustomed to see on the subject elsewhere in fiction or online; it feels more part of my own world than that sort of discussion, by implying that this is no longer a general female predicament in a country like Denmark, that the knowledge of what it is is available, but that dysfunctional dynamics can nevertheless be peculiarly seductive to some. Whilst 'Female Killers' makes it quite clear that this is a world in which women can be aggressors as well as victims. The Last of the Summer Wine dynamic of placid men and belligerent women is nothing remotely new to me, yet I don't often see it written down in fiction (the last time was probably in some of the stories in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner ); here was one novel way of putting it, following an anecdote about chimps the old males just sat around waiting to be possessed by something big. A savannah full of males with banjos, he thought, and females with hair under their arms. And spears.
Even a civilised woman may not always feel at home with her female friends - conventional ones may have little respect for non-standard love relationships (something I've found quite a few times) as in 'She Frequented Cemeteries', whose opening paragraph also has a wonderful sense of place in both capitalised and lower case specifics: She started frequenting cemeteries that summer, preferring the ones others rarely visited. She could go straight from social events with white wine, canapés, and peripheral acquaintances, cycle to the nearest cemetery, and find the corner where no one ever really went. At the far end of Vestre Cemetery, by the Inuit and the Faeroese and the war graves, down by the disused chapel was a quiet spot. Well away from the plots where brewers, publishers, and prime ministers lay shoulder to shoulder and were dead. There was no edged grass, no small ponds with specially purchased ducks. Most of all, it resembled the hinterland of Jutland, depopulated and with plywood boards across the windows, and through it all a diagonal tunnel of willow trees. No one ever went there, so that was where she liked to go.
Other recognisable aspects of Danishness were here in 'Mutual Destruction' (hunting culture, c.f. the film The Hunt among other things), and there, and in a couple of others, the unsentimentality about animals I saw mentioned in The Year of Living Danishly and in news stories earlier this year about public dissections. In 'The Wadden Sea' - apparently the place to go when a Dane wants to move to the seaside for their health - the area and its myths are as much a character as any human. And in 'Flight', the narrator is coming to terms with a breakup from an ex who was an engineer for wind turbines, work which is not presented as anything remotely out of the ordinary - this also contained one of my favourite instances of unusual imagery; in all the reading and thinking about landscapes I've done, I'd never met this feeling before:
There was frost in the grass, and then I began to cry. It came from way down, from a place I didn’t think I had, and it hurt, too.
To make it keep on hurting, I imagined I ate up all the grass, all the cows, all the birds. I pictured myself stuffing the meadow, the stream, its banks, and soil into my mouth. I forced all kinds of things into my stomach: church steeples, castles made of straw bales, silos. The grove on the other side of the stream, and the military training area behind the barracks. Eventually, all that was left was me and the tuft of grass on which I balanced. That, and a great NM72C wind turbine I refused to devour. And since you can’t eat yourself, I went home.
Minna Needs Rehearsal Space may sound gimmicky: a 90-page novella written in sentences of mostly one clause, each on a new line, it resembles both poetry and a long series of Facebook status updates or tweets. Yet the stripped-down phrasing, with its judicious choices of actions and emotions, gives great and unusual dignity to events such as being dumped by text, being aware of the recent ex with others, (how much worse, how much less escape when they might appear in the mainstream media, not just social media - Minna's ex is a journalist) and pushing away less-favourite friends in an expression of pain, self-carapacing and retaliation. (Have I done that? Hell yes.)
Minna unfriends another two people.
Minna unfriends more.
Minna unfriends Britta.
Britta’s an old schoolmate.
Britta’s written,
Britta’s put the pork loin on the Weber.
Minna can no longer leave well enough alone, but
The unfriendings provide no relief.
Minna’s been unfriended herself.
The pain of unfriending’s unbearable.
These are things which one is not supposed to mind at Minna's age of 40, yet which actually do hurt. I thought it was also a superb evocation of the socially adrift state of being single, childless and over 35, when almost everyone else seems ensconced in other spheres of life, with partners, kids or both. Yes, people are in touch, but often not the right ones, and when it comes down to it, she's alone. Minna is another one of these freelance creative characters, an avant-garde composer, but whilst she doesn't have an office-type schedule, she isn't unfeasibly rich, pretentiously swanning about; everything that happens could take place in evenings and weekends off from a modest job.
I liked the way that her only reliable companion and comfort is a memoir by Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, which she takes almost everywhere, having thought-conversations with lines from it. This dead white dude, to use the common parlance, didn't seem a predictable choice from an author who'd been promoted as feminist in various US book blog posts I'd skimmed last year; however it shows the value Minna places on established serious art, and fits the Scandinavian focus of Nors' stories. (Bergman's other memoir, The Magic Lantern is a favourite of Nors herself according to a couple of articles.) It also reminded me a lot of the relationship I had to Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson. I especially liked the line Bergman’s the only human on the train. Minna's relationship with [the] Bergman [book] often seems more artist-to-artist, rather than an overt crush, though some of it could certainly be read as an implied rebound:
Bergman doesn’t protest.
Bergman makes himself comfortable.
Bergman whispers sweet words to her.
Bergman’s words don’t work.
Minna’s lower lip quivers.
Or later
Minna’s wakened by a muffled thud on the floor.
It’s Bergman.
There has been a lot of talk in the past couple of years about contemporary novels focusing on women's lives, most of which I can't connect with; most of these novels have always been full of the same generalisations I always heard at school and in magazines and which made me feel like a different species or gender; but Nors, especially in the Minna novella, is one of the exceptions, alongside Emma Jane Unsworth's Animals (which, a rarity, even features characters I'd quite like to be).
Like the Karate Chop stories, in Minna there is a strong sense of Danishness. (If it's a stereotype, it's a useful one, as this clean, minimalist feeling of that prompted me to do a fair bit of tidying in breaks from reading this volume.) There's the directness, the places; the modern - in a list of things 'ordinary people' do, one is visit swinger clubs, according to The Year of Living Danishly more popular and above board in Denmark than anywhere else in the world - and the ancient: Minna was haunted as a child by images of the Grauballe Man bog body, and at one point in the story The Fenris wolf howls. And there's a lot of nature, a more traditional subject for poetry:
Minna hiked through Marselisborg Forest.
Minna wanted to hike down to Ballehage, but
Minna met a roe deer.
The deer stood on a bluff.
The deer stood stock-still and stared at Minna.
Minna stood stock-still and stared at the deer.
The deer was a creature of the deep forest.
The deer was mild and moist of gaze.
Minna was mild and moist of gaze.
The deer’s legs like stalks.
The deer’s fur in the sun.
Minna’s hair in the wind.
The forest was empty when the deer departed.
Minna looked across the bay.
Minna inhaled the salt.
Minna gazed at the pier.
Minna picked mushrooms from half-rotted stumps.
Minna threw her arms around a beech tree.
Love ought to find its voice again.
Loss ought to fade out, but
Loss and love are connected, Minna thinks.
Karate Chop was published in the US last year, though the Americans have to wait until next year for Minna - however they get another bonus novella with some similarities, in So Much for That Winter: Novellas. I am rather envious of them for that other one, but in the meantime am raring to read the few other Dorthe Nors short stories available in English.
--------
I'm glad to see - what I hope is the beginning of - a turn away from the tweeness that has beset UK book cover design for a number of years (e.g. cute little pictures used as centrepieces or repeating patterns, faux 20s-50s vintage, bastardised Slavic folk designs, that sort of thing.) I've also missed the gender neutrality of most 90s covers I got to know in my teens and early twenties. US covers of new 2010s titles have often looked more 'grown-up' compared with the British editions. A new trend towards the bold, bright and geometric - and yes, more neutral - appears to be emerging and I like this very much. An early glimmer of hope was last year's Upstairs at the Party; a GR friend's review made me notice these excellent striped covers [scroll down] that Vintage are using for Bruce Chatwin, although perhaps these are not brand new. And now Pushkin - who have very much been purveyors of twee in their classics range - are going for this boldness with their contemporary titles, like this one and The Fishermen . (And, okay, they're American, but I find myself seeing Deep Vellum's lovely clean geometric designs as part of the same trend.)
Apparently I think picnicware makes better fiction than bone china.
The weakest point, IMO, was 'Mother, Grandmother and Aunt Ellen'; in a lot of story collections I might have found this one of the more interesting, due to a handful of particular details, but in this exceptionally strong selection it lacked the strangeness and urgency that made me sit up and take notice of the others.
Among my favourites for topics alone were 'The Buddhist', which is kind of about the contemporary corporate / egotistical ways Buddhism is used, and 'The Heron' in which a peculiar individual discusses birds and other things in the Frederiksberg Gardens park: I found myself snorting with laughter at phrases like There are problems at the end of the park where the alcoholics sit, particularly with ducks, or the way herons never really muster the enthusiasm, before things became somewhat darker.
A couple of forays to New York go rather well: the Latina maid of a wealthy Danish expat couple has to deal with a bizarre unsatisfactory item from their online supermarket shop, (I also liked the unexpected detail that the laundrette was run by Albanians). Then a sociology professor narrates the strikingly unsentimentalised tale of a down-and-out disabled man who frequented a McDonalds near his work. It isn't syrupy, or philosophical, or overtly sociopathic enough to sound like American fiction about such a character, and this juxtaposition with the setting was rather fascinating.
Several of the stories give that sense that in Denmark - and other Nordic countries - the default expectation for women is of something stronger, more independent and less docile than the implied history in Anglo fiction & films (and as with various Scandinavian TV series, my family background leads me to feel more at home in these works, which make infinitely more sense to me than the generalisations women make about other women in most English-language novels). It comes across quite subtly in relationship-focused stories like 'Do You Know Jussi?', which somehow carry a stronger sense of personhood, less meekness. In 'Karate Chop', the intriguing narrative of a woman who ends up in abusive relationships whilst her professional background should enable her to recognise them, it is clear that bad things can still happen. The exploration of thought processes has a non-dogmatic clarity more akin to very well-written psychology than to the righteous tumult I'm accustomed to see on the subject elsewhere in fiction or online; it feels more part of my own world than that sort of discussion, by implying that this is no longer a general female predicament in a country like Denmark, that the knowledge of what it is is available, but that dysfunctional dynamics can nevertheless be peculiarly seductive to some. Whilst 'Female Killers' makes it quite clear that this is a world in which women can be aggressors as well as victims. The Last of the Summer Wine dynamic of placid men and belligerent women is nothing remotely new to me, yet I don't often see it written down in fiction (the last time was probably in some of the stories in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner ); here was one novel way of putting it, following an anecdote about chimps the old males just sat around waiting to be possessed by something big. A savannah full of males with banjos, he thought, and females with hair under their arms. And spears.
Even a civilised woman may not always feel at home with her female friends - conventional ones may have little respect for non-standard love relationships (something I've found quite a few times) as in 'She Frequented Cemeteries', whose opening paragraph also has a wonderful sense of place in both capitalised and lower case specifics: She started frequenting cemeteries that summer, preferring the ones others rarely visited. She could go straight from social events with white wine, canapés, and peripheral acquaintances, cycle to the nearest cemetery, and find the corner where no one ever really went. At the far end of Vestre Cemetery, by the Inuit and the Faeroese and the war graves, down by the disused chapel was a quiet spot. Well away from the plots where brewers, publishers, and prime ministers lay shoulder to shoulder and were dead. There was no edged grass, no small ponds with specially purchased ducks. Most of all, it resembled the hinterland of Jutland, depopulated and with plywood boards across the windows, and through it all a diagonal tunnel of willow trees. No one ever went there, so that was where she liked to go.
Other recognisable aspects of Danishness were here in 'Mutual Destruction' (hunting culture, c.f. the film The Hunt among other things), and there, and in a couple of others, the unsentimentality about animals I saw mentioned in The Year of Living Danishly and in news stories earlier this year about public dissections. In 'The Wadden Sea' - apparently the place to go when a Dane wants to move to the seaside for their health - the area and its myths are as much a character as any human. And in 'Flight', the narrator is coming to terms with a breakup from an ex who was an engineer for wind turbines, work which is not presented as anything remotely out of the ordinary - this also contained one of my favourite instances of unusual imagery; in all the reading and thinking about landscapes I've done, I'd never met this feeling before:
There was frost in the grass, and then I began to cry. It came from way down, from a place I didn’t think I had, and it hurt, too.
To make it keep on hurting, I imagined I ate up all the grass, all the cows, all the birds. I pictured myself stuffing the meadow, the stream, its banks, and soil into my mouth. I forced all kinds of things into my stomach: church steeples, castles made of straw bales, silos. The grove on the other side of the stream, and the military training area behind the barracks. Eventually, all that was left was me and the tuft of grass on which I balanced. That, and a great NM72C wind turbine I refused to devour. And since you can’t eat yourself, I went home.
Minna Needs Rehearsal Space may sound gimmicky: a 90-page novella written in sentences of mostly one clause, each on a new line, it resembles both poetry and a long series of Facebook status updates or tweets. Yet the stripped-down phrasing, with its judicious choices of actions and emotions, gives great and unusual dignity to events such as being dumped by text, being aware of the recent ex with others, (how much worse, how much less escape when they might appear in the mainstream media, not just social media - Minna's ex is a journalist) and pushing away less-favourite friends in an expression of pain, self-carapacing and retaliation. (Have I done that? Hell yes.)
Minna unfriends another two people.
Minna unfriends more.
Minna unfriends Britta.
Britta’s an old schoolmate.
Britta’s written,
Britta’s put the pork loin on the Weber.
Minna can no longer leave well enough alone, but
The unfriendings provide no relief.
Minna’s been unfriended herself.
The pain of unfriending’s unbearable.
These are things which one is not supposed to mind at Minna's age of 40, yet which actually do hurt. I thought it was also a superb evocation of the socially adrift state of being single, childless and over 35, when almost everyone else seems ensconced in other spheres of life, with partners, kids or both. Yes, people are in touch, but often not the right ones, and when it comes down to it, she's alone. Minna is another one of these freelance creative characters, an avant-garde composer, but whilst she doesn't have an office-type schedule, she isn't unfeasibly rich, pretentiously swanning about; everything that happens could take place in evenings and weekends off from a modest job.
I liked the way that her only reliable companion and comfort is a memoir by Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, which she takes almost everywhere, having thought-conversations with lines from it. This dead white dude, to use the common parlance, didn't seem a predictable choice from an author who'd been promoted as feminist in various US book blog posts I'd skimmed last year; however it shows the value Minna places on established serious art, and fits the Scandinavian focus of Nors' stories. (Bergman's other memoir, The Magic Lantern is a favourite of Nors herself according to a couple of articles.) It also reminded me a lot of the relationship I had to Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson. I especially liked the line Bergman’s the only human on the train. Minna's relationship with [the] Bergman [book] often seems more artist-to-artist, rather than an overt crush, though some of it could certainly be read as an implied rebound:
Bergman doesn’t protest.
Bergman makes himself comfortable.
Bergman whispers sweet words to her.
Bergman’s words don’t work.
Minna’s lower lip quivers.
Or later
Minna’s wakened by a muffled thud on the floor.
It’s Bergman.
There has been a lot of talk in the past couple of years about contemporary novels focusing on women's lives, most of which I can't connect with; most of these novels have always been full of the same generalisations I always heard at school and in magazines and which made me feel like a different species or gender; but Nors, especially in the Minna novella, is one of the exceptions, alongside Emma Jane Unsworth's Animals (which, a rarity, even features characters I'd quite like to be).
Like the Karate Chop stories, in Minna there is a strong sense of Danishness. (If it's a stereotype, it's a useful one, as this clean, minimalist feeling of that prompted me to do a fair bit of tidying in breaks from reading this volume.) There's the directness, the places; the modern - in a list of things 'ordinary people' do, one is visit swinger clubs, according to The Year of Living Danishly more popular and above board in Denmark than anywhere else in the world - and the ancient: Minna was haunted as a child by images of the Grauballe Man bog body, and at one point in the story The Fenris wolf howls. And there's a lot of nature, a more traditional subject for poetry:
Minna hiked through Marselisborg Forest.
Minna wanted to hike down to Ballehage, but
Minna met a roe deer.
The deer stood on a bluff.
The deer stood stock-still and stared at Minna.
Minna stood stock-still and stared at the deer.
The deer was a creature of the deep forest.
The deer was mild and moist of gaze.
Minna was mild and moist of gaze.
The deer’s legs like stalks.
The deer’s fur in the sun.
Minna’s hair in the wind.
The forest was empty when the deer departed.
Minna looked across the bay.
Minna inhaled the salt.
Minna gazed at the pier.
Minna picked mushrooms from half-rotted stumps.
Minna threw her arms around a beech tree.
Love ought to find its voice again.
Loss ought to fade out, but
Loss and love are connected, Minna thinks.
Karate Chop was published in the US last year, though the Americans have to wait until next year for Minna - however they get another bonus novella with some similarities, in So Much for That Winter: Novellas. I am rather envious of them for that other one, but in the meantime am raring to read the few other Dorthe Nors short stories available in English.
--------
I'm glad to see - what I hope is the beginning of - a turn away from the tweeness that has beset UK book cover design for a number of years (e.g. cute little pictures used as centrepieces or repeating patterns, faux 20s-50s vintage, bastardised Slavic folk designs, that sort of thing.) I've also missed the gender neutrality of most 90s covers I got to know in my teens and early twenties. US covers of new 2010s titles have often looked more 'grown-up' compared with the British editions. A new trend towards the bold, bright and geometric - and yes, more neutral - appears to be emerging and I like this very much. An early glimmer of hope was last year's Upstairs at the Party; a GR friend's review made me notice these excellent striped covers [scroll down] that Vintage are using for Bruce Chatwin, although perhaps these are not brand new. And now Pushkin - who have very much been purveyors of twee in their classics range - are going for this boldness with their contemporary titles, like this one and The Fishermen . (And, okay, they're American, but I find myself seeing Deep Vellum's lovely clean geometric designs as part of the same trend.)
September 24, 2023
Minna är en femma! Älskade den. Jättebra.
Kantslag en trea.
Kantslag en trea.
September 11, 2017
Nors's bleak minimalism is an... acquired taste. Her stories are so dark, and so minimal that they're sometimes a bit of a challenge and I had to step away from this collection for a little.
As for Minna, her style there (constant Facebook-status style lines) is a fascinating exercise, and really gets in your head. Like the short stories, wasn't completely won over, but I don't regret the experience.
As for Minna, her style there (constant Facebook-status style lines) is a fascinating exercise, and really gets in your head. Like the short stories, wasn't completely won over, but I don't regret the experience.
April 12, 2017
I love Nors' bluntness-- which does not affect cruelty, but more so a keen sense of brevity and the value of directness. The stories contained here are largely concerned with those moments in our lives that we identify as meaningful, but still do not recognize the extent of that meaning. As readers, we are privileged to witness these moments of great vulnerability, and readers are kept "on the hook" as we seek to find sense in these moments. Nors doesn't always deliver-- but that is not her objective, her objective is to put us there and relish the moments that create us. Nors' pacing and and her detail make each of these stories a work of minimalist art.
April 27, 2017
This is an unusual and well-written collection of short stories and a novella. The writing style is sharp and precise with no words wasted. But not everything is spelled out and you have to read between the lines. Work out what the slightly opaque endings mean. The stories are all quite different but all about real people facing life's challenges. Separation, death and loneliness.
If you like an easy read this is not for you, but if you like to think hard about your reading, this is a great choice.
If you like an easy read this is not for you, but if you like to think hard about your reading, this is a great choice.
June 12, 2021
A friend sent me this pairing: he used to live in Denmark and thought I might enjoy a taste of something different, specifically something unhygge to prove not everything is hygge-dygge in Denmark.
‘Minna’ is a novel in verse, and the translation produces a crisp read of sharp impressions. Minna is a composer-musician, and the novel traces the end of her stable and stabilising relationship with Lars, her looking for rehearsal space, her despair, and eventually an inadvertent encounter with an easy-going musician, Tim, on Bornholm, a holiday island. She contends with her loneliness, a fierce, intrusive, overbearing health fanatic sister, Elisabeth; with Lars’ new relationship with the glamorous songstress Linda Lund whose work and success Minna both dislikes and envies, and with the dreadful Karin, who bombards Minna with emails because, as Minna realises, ‘Karin requires a host animal’. Her friend and fellow composer, Jette, is small comfort and their daily mid-morning coffee sessions become increasingly desultory. And so Minna decides to get away from everything and go to Bornholm where she hopes she will heal.
One of the central features of the narrative is Minna’s self-chosen companion, a volume of Ingmar Bergman’s, ‘Billeder’, which I think, in English, is ‘Images: my life in film’. I cannot pretend to have understood the references or the quotations, but from what I know of Bergman’s work, he is interested in questions of loneliness, sex, mortality. For Minna, the loneliness, as well as the sudden absence of sex, is a preoccupation. I was, in this respect, reminded of a French film from 1986, ‘Le Rayon Vert’. This film charts the tribulations of a young French woman, Delphine, who, like Minna, has recently ended a relationship and finds herself, in French holiday season, single and hopelessly unable to enjoy the company of those who feel secure in their relationships or in their singleness. According to a critic, she ‘is incapable of playing the dumb singles games that lead to one-night stands.’ Minna ditto.
As portrayals of loneliness, I found Minna’s and Delphine’s experiences penetratingly painful. And I think Dorthe Nors’ adoption of the verse style very effective. The impressions I mentioned earlier are like a cinematographer’s images, and that is why, I imagine, the presence of Bergman is so important in the novel: his technique and themes are being given a literary treatment. For me the experiment worked very well as a technique for quickly creating strong feelings in the reader. The technique also allows for some poetic moments, especially when dealing with the sea.
By contrast, ‘Karate Chop’ is a collection of short stories in prose. At first, I didn’t take to these at all. The first three - apparently inconsequential tales about people watching TV, a man and a dog watching another man and another dog, and a weirdo Buddhist - seemed to me sense-less. However, by the time I reached the fourth, in which a delivery man and a cleaning lady meet because of a 4lb tomato, I was more or less on the right wavelength to enjoy them. I think if you think of them and accept them as snippets or chapters from abandoned novels, they stand as interesting observations about the peculiarities of human behaviour, sometimes odd, sometimes not unexpected, but always manageably believable – a kind of Nordic magic realism?
Worth giving Nors a go, I’d say. She knows what she’s doing.
‘Minna’ is a novel in verse, and the translation produces a crisp read of sharp impressions. Minna is a composer-musician, and the novel traces the end of her stable and stabilising relationship with Lars, her looking for rehearsal space, her despair, and eventually an inadvertent encounter with an easy-going musician, Tim, on Bornholm, a holiday island. She contends with her loneliness, a fierce, intrusive, overbearing health fanatic sister, Elisabeth; with Lars’ new relationship with the glamorous songstress Linda Lund whose work and success Minna both dislikes and envies, and with the dreadful Karin, who bombards Minna with emails because, as Minna realises, ‘Karin requires a host animal’. Her friend and fellow composer, Jette, is small comfort and their daily mid-morning coffee sessions become increasingly desultory. And so Minna decides to get away from everything and go to Bornholm where she hopes she will heal.
One of the central features of the narrative is Minna’s self-chosen companion, a volume of Ingmar Bergman’s, ‘Billeder’, which I think, in English, is ‘Images: my life in film’. I cannot pretend to have understood the references or the quotations, but from what I know of Bergman’s work, he is interested in questions of loneliness, sex, mortality. For Minna, the loneliness, as well as the sudden absence of sex, is a preoccupation. I was, in this respect, reminded of a French film from 1986, ‘Le Rayon Vert’. This film charts the tribulations of a young French woman, Delphine, who, like Minna, has recently ended a relationship and finds herself, in French holiday season, single and hopelessly unable to enjoy the company of those who feel secure in their relationships or in their singleness. According to a critic, she ‘is incapable of playing the dumb singles games that lead to one-night stands.’ Minna ditto.
As portrayals of loneliness, I found Minna’s and Delphine’s experiences penetratingly painful. And I think Dorthe Nors’ adoption of the verse style very effective. The impressions I mentioned earlier are like a cinematographer’s images, and that is why, I imagine, the presence of Bergman is so important in the novel: his technique and themes are being given a literary treatment. For me the experiment worked very well as a technique for quickly creating strong feelings in the reader. The technique also allows for some poetic moments, especially when dealing with the sea.
By contrast, ‘Karate Chop’ is a collection of short stories in prose. At first, I didn’t take to these at all. The first three - apparently inconsequential tales about people watching TV, a man and a dog watching another man and another dog, and a weirdo Buddhist - seemed to me sense-less. However, by the time I reached the fourth, in which a delivery man and a cleaning lady meet because of a 4lb tomato, I was more or less on the right wavelength to enjoy them. I think if you think of them and accept them as snippets or chapters from abandoned novels, they stand as interesting observations about the peculiarities of human behaviour, sometimes odd, sometimes not unexpected, but always manageably believable – a kind of Nordic magic realism?
Worth giving Nors a go, I’d say. She knows what she’s doing.
October 2, 2020
Pushkin Press has created a pretty unique book. Start at one end to read a collection of 15 short stories: Karate Chop. Flip the book over to begin from the other end and you start reading a strange but gripping short story: Minna Needs Rehearsal Space. Either way, you’re in for a treat. Nors has a fresh, brave voice and her stories shine a light on the darker side of human nature. In Minna Needs Rehearsal Space the eponymous character is a musician struggling to manage her emotions following the painful breakup of a romantic relationship. At first, I found the story’s style frustrating. The stream of short sentences - for the most part beginning with “Minna needs”, “Minna feels” or “Minna wants” - seemed irritating and simplistic. After a few pages, however, I was sucked in. By stripping back the narrative text Nors creates an incredibly direct and forceful short story.
Stick with her, it’s worth it.
On the other end of this dual publication are the short stories that seem designed for the minute attention spans of the digital age - the longest is nine pages. Almost every story has a strong visceral feel to it. From the opening tale "Do You Know Jussi" about a young girl’s sexual encounter, to "The Heron", a grim reflection on Frederiksberg Gardens, Nors highlights the grittier, and often overlooked, side of life. In a novel, it might be too heavy, but explored through these snappy short stories, it works well.
March 10, 2018
De eerste paar verhalen weet ik niet zo goed wat ik ermee aan moet, maar uiteindelijk heb ik toch genoten van deze schrijfkunst. Het langere verhaal 'Minna zoekt oefenruimte' levert een bijzondere leeservaring op.
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January 17, 2017
Nja, sisådär, svag trea. Fattar inte riktigt vad allt hallabaloo var kring den här novellsamlingen när kom ut. Kortromanen som finns i en senare tryckning hoppade jag över.
November 2, 2019
Uneven, some of the stories are excellent though.
March 25, 2023
Low-key loved Minna Needs Rehearsal Space until, the standout style wearing thin even in a relatively short read, I didn't. Nors can hit a bleak note with the best of them; on this evidence, she doesn't always know where to stop.
March 19, 2015
Some stories are short because not much happens. Some are short because a lot of things are skipped over. These stories are short because so much is hinted at and left to your imagination. I really enjoyed them. The novella is unusual in structure - the layout forces you to read it differently to a normal book, as does the sentence structure. But it is a good, short read - an entertaining story even if it is about a rather sad woman having a bit of a tough time.
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August 5, 2015Sparky, brilliant stuff. I particularly loved Minna.
October 25, 2015
Favoritnoveller: vinterträdgården, svävandet
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November 15, 2016Karateslag sprak mij het meest aan. Korte verhalen, beeldend, die net voldoende details geven.
November 22, 2016
Loved it. Fresh and funny.
November 15, 2015
Minna är helt fantastisk. Övriga mer varierande kvalitet.
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