Circling around Remembrance: A Conversation with Dorthe Nors

Abstract

Circling around RemembranceA Conversation with Dorthe Nors Kathryn Savage (bio) CELEBRATED Danish writer Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction book, A Line in the World, translated by Caroline Waight, is a stunning work that documents a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast of Denmark, moving from Skagen to the Wadden Sea. "Wandering Houses," from Nors's collection of fourteen essays, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in the September 2022 issue of World Literature Today. Nors is the author of the story collections Wild Swims and Karate Chop, two novellas, and four novels, including Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. In her most recent book, her spare and stunning prose depicts the harsh Jutland Peninsula with immediacy, as she moves between the past and the present to record a nuanced and layered place. This work is as much about the external world as it is an exploration of inner weather and personal memory, and the result is an expansive and intimate archive of movement and belonging. Kathryn Savage: In your essay "The Tracks around Bulbjerg," you write, "The landscape is an archive of memory." What did you mean by this line? Dorthe Nors: I wrote A Line in the World in one year. One of the first things I noticed when I traveled in this landscape, which I've known my entire life, was that episodic memory was stored in the places I went. You see, that's how we work: we remember things when we reenter places we used to live in or travel through. Visit your childhood school, for instance, and I'm certain that an episodic memory that you've not been in touch with for ages will emerge from "the archive." The famous Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who traveled a lot, said: "To travel is to live." I changed that phrase a bit in A Line in the World: "To travel is to remember." Savage: You write both fiction and nonfiction. Would you describe the relationship between form and content in your own work? Nors: I want to write in all kinds of forms. I couldn't imagine spending my entire life as a writer who only writes novels, for instance. I love language. I love the things it can pick up on, describe, dig into. I treat my language as if it was an instrument; a cellist didn't become good at playing the cello without rehearsing every day and challenging themselves. The same with language for me. I want my instrument to really develop and grow, as a linguistic art, so I change forms. And while it's true that A Line in the World is composed of fourteen essays, I prefer to call them chapters since the book turned out to feel like one continuous essay to me. Savage: I once heard you describe writing a short story like standing on a stage and singing without stopping, You must be there! Do you think the essay form asks something different from the writer? Nors: I think that there will be elements of the intensity and the "in situ" presence of the short story in both the novel and the essay, as writing forms. The difference between novels and short stories is of course the length and the way intensity varies in the novel. A Line in the World has both novel and short-story qualities, but the difficulty here was that facts and nonfictive information—about landscape, places, local history—had to be embedded in the prose. That was quite a challenge. Essays tend to be didactic and lean toward an urge to educate the reader, and I don't like didactic information, [End Page 10] preaching, etc., being mixed up in my literature. I worked hard to figure out how to solve that problem. You could say that A Line in the World is a fusion of three forms—novel, short story, and essay—without completely being any of them. Click for larger view View full resolution Savage: Across prose forms, how do you balance the ideas that drive your work with the scenes and people themselves? Nors...