Wild Swims: Stories by Dorthe Nors

Abstract

BOOKS IN REVIEW looks out at “the friendly, broken, undulating landscape, so far from the fucking metaphysical pampa of Argentina.” The buildings of Montevideo, familiar yet oldfashioned and exotic, soothe him, and he begins to shake free from the weight of his life as a broke writer and stay-at-home dad, stuck in a “paralyzed” relationship with his wife, Catalina. Not surprisingly, there also happens to be another woman involved: Magalí Guerra Zabala, twenty-eight, “the woman from Uruguay,” whom he fell for at a beachside literary festival months before and is planning to rendezvous with in the Uruguayan capital. He can barely contain his anticipation: “I was in love with a woman and in love with the city where she lived. And I made up everything about it, or almost everything. An imaginary city in an adjacent country. That was where I walked, more than down real streets.” The Woman from Uruguay gathers momentum and sparks as Lucas and Magalí eventually meet up at an outdoor café and plot their afternoon seduction over multiple rounds of drinks. Inevitably, though, their plans go awry, and the day takes on a sinister, hallucinatory edge— involving a trip to a tattoo parlor, possible UFO sighting, snarling pit bull, and angry ex-boyfriend—before finally erupting in violence. Has Lucas been deceived all along by Magalí, lured by Montevideo’s laid-back charm (and public pot-smoking)? Has he been set up, an easy target for street thugs with his pockets for once full of cash? “You have to be careful with Montevideo,” a friend admonishes him. “Montevideo will kill you without a second thought. Every now and then it does, just lays somebody out.” Mairal, himself an acclaimed and bestselling Argentine author, has written a gripping adventure novel of the mind— rendered in pulsating prose by Jennifer Croft—of a middle-aged writer’s delusions and spiraling collapse. But even after Lucas hits rock-bottom, he’ll discover new, truer ways of being both a father and writer. “I’m working on a book of poems, and, very slowly, another novel,” he later explains, “but no Amazonian adventures, no narcos or gunfights or knives, just a few kicks on the other side of the river.” Crossing the River Plate has had a profound effect on Lucas, and nothing will be the same again. Anderson Tepper New York Dorthe Nors Wild Swims: Stories Trans. Misha Hoekstra. Minneapolis. Graywolf Press. 2021. 128 pages. WILD SWIMS, the second short-story collection by Danish author Dorthe Nors, makes its US debut with fourteen minitales , nine brand-new. Ranging from four to seven pages, the stories are small sips ending in dark rum punches. The book appeared in Denmark as Kort over Canada in 2018. Settings range from Sydvest, Minneapolis , Los Angeles, Manitoba, New York, London, and Norway to Denmark. Scenes capture feelings that elude a camera lens, unveiling inner motivations. Voices shift effectively, with some in first person, others in third. Most pieces convey remoteness, in landscape as well as character. Even in large cities there’s a bareness. People neither exude joy nor connect with one another. Nors teases at times with a cozy beginning, but eventually the murky underbelly emerges. Hygge, that Danish sense of coziness, never lasts long. In fact, the aptly titled “Hygge” is a good example. The initial, contented feeling between an aging professor and a woman named Lilly slowly merges with his memories of Aunt Clara, progressing to bitterness in his mind. The tale begins with a relaxed tone: “Then we were sitting there, Lilly and me, and she had made coffee and baked one of those chocolate cakes that are soft in the middle.” Yet four pages later, it ends peevishly: “When it was all over and done, it looked as if she was forcing me, and I didn’t like it.” Nors withholds information, structuring plots out of allusions to past events not fully told—reminiscent of Ann Beattie , Raymond Carver, or William Saroyan. Nors embeds a man in a deer stand with a broken ankle but takes away his cell phone. She places a woman on a writer’s retreat near an ex-lover’s mother...