Dorthe Nors’s Wild Swims is a small book in a literary market that skews big. Publishers and prize committees salivate over double-decker novels like Garth Risk Hallberg’s City on Fire and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, and the conventional wisdom is that short stories and novellas don’t sell. Small books almost constitute a genre unto themselves. Bookstore-publisher City Lights has maintained its Pocket Poets series since the 1950s, and New Directions has published major works in wafer-thin “Bibelot” and Pearl editions.
Yet many fiction publishers are either loath to publish a small book or they don’t know how to market one. Sometimes, an established writer can get away with a low-overhead nonfiction cash-in: Random House turned George Saunders’s 2013 graduation address at Syracuse University into a $15 pamphlet, and recently Michael Chabon republished his acclaimed GQ essay in a slim volume about fatherhood called Pops (after dashing off a few new pieces to fill out the page count). But in fiction, and particularly for less well-known writers, a small book can be a commercially risky endeavor.
It’s all the more impressive, then, that Nors has carved out such a distinctive space for herself in European literature. Though she’s published novels, she’s best known for, and most excels at, the short form. Her first collection, Karate Chop, held 15 stories in 90 pages. Her U.K. publisher, Pushkin Press, paired it with the novella Minna Needs Rehearsal Space (also 90 pages), while Graywolf Press, in turn, brought out Karate Chop on its own and yoked Minna to another novella, Days, in a volume called So Much for That Winter. The 14 stories in Wild Swims (originally published in Denmark in 2018) total 128 pages. To have a career making small books, which often comprise even smaller parts, is refreshingly anomalous.
Obvious but superficial overlap exists among Nors and two giants of the experimental short story, Lydia Davis and Diane Williams. But where Davis plays with voice and form, and Williams is more of an imagist, Nors is most directly concerned with characters and situations, even if she doesn’t dramatize them in a traditional way. Her protagonists often appear in a state of static reflection: staring out a window at Pershing Square in L.A., standing on the edge of an abandoned fairground, gazing up at the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
Sometimes we learn what circumstances that brought these people to these moments, but Nors’s stories progress in associations rather than drawing straight lines between narrative points. Wild Swims opens with “In a Deer Stand,” in which a husband fleeing domestic strife winds up with a broken leg in the middle of nowhere, waiting either to be rescued or eaten by wolves. As he thinks back on his last conversations with his wife, Nors writes, still in present tense: “Her hands cupped over her knees, and he hasn’t seen her cry in years. She didn’t cry when her mother died. Her face can clap shut over a feeling like the lid of a freezer over stick insects. He had some in eighth grade, in a terrarium, stick insects. […] His biology teacher said that putting them in the freezer would kill them.” Nors weaves such striking imagery throughout her stories, leaving us to intuitively make sense of how everything fits together.
What Nors does have in common with Davis and Williams, aside from a proclivity for brevity, is an intense consciousness of language. Occasionally she pulls back a bit, challenging herself to write a more naturalistic story a la Raymond Carver, where events unfold in linear order and the prose calls less attention to itself. Successful examples of that include the quietly devastating “On Narrow Paved Paths,” in which a woman tends to her terminally ill friend, and “Compaction Birds,” a glimpse of a widower’s loneliness and desperation. But Nors’s best stories and sentences metaphorically conflate disparate narrative realms, as when she takes us from the baking sidewalks of L.A. to the frozen lakes of Canada with nothing more than a comma in “Pershing Square.” Nors’s deft touch gives rise to her unusual way of structuring her stories; in the hands of a less refined prose writer, it would all seem a mishmash.
These translations can occasionally sound stilted, but one imagines this to be intentional (Misha Hoekstra is Nors’s preferred translator). For example, “And she can remember that the one brother had to borrow some socks in order to sleep. These days she thinks of him often, when she herself is going to sleep. She has a pair of socks on right now.” Nors isn’t interested in mere euphony, but in using language to capture ephemeral moments of being. Her tone always comes through in translation, though inevitably, some nuances are lost to English speakers—especially banal cultural references pertaining to different areas of Denmark.
But this never hampers the accessibility of Nors’s stories, because her work is engaging on multiple levels. One hopes, then, that the author’s influence can spread far and wide. Some younger North American and European writers, such as Nicolette Polek and Katharina Volckmer, have lately joined the small-book tradition, and if the 2020s bring a rise in the popularity of small books, it will be a trend worth celebrating.
Wild Swims is available on February 2 from Graywolf Press.
