Dorthe Nors' "So Much for That Winter" is a short book. You can finish it in half an afternoon. It is translated from the Danish. The two stories feature forty-something Danish women who contemplate their lives after being dumped by their boyfriends. And this fake naive style is all you get in the first novella, "Minna Needs More Rehearsal Space."
Each short sentence is declarative, without modifiers or clauses, and each one gets a line to itself, like a long, monotonous poem. "Minna goes in the shower./Minna lets the water run, and then she stands there:/Minna with her lips turned toward the tiles." Minna this and Minna that and so on.
Minna is a composer who spends her days wandering around her apartment and the streets after her boyfriend Lars dumps her via e-mail. She tries to act and feel normal, but the pain of loss is always there, threatening to engulf her. She feels very much alone; Nors presents her as a sensitive soul in contrast to her coarse, braying sister Elisabeth and her friend Jette. She also feels estranged from people in general.
"Ordinary people cheat on their taxes./Ordinary people go to swinger clubs./Ordinary people flee the scene of the crime./ … Ordinary people just need a stage./The pig performs gladly."
Minna prides herself on her jerk filter and makes herself inconspicuous, willfully boring herself and everyone around her. She carries Ingmar Bergman's writings around with her, but what significance he has in her life remains a mystery.
But despite her derailed life, she still harbors a faint hope for a "license to live." Finally she rouses herself enough to take a trip to the Baltic. There, she begins to come alive in the water and starts singing loudly. This attracts the attention of a kind-looking man named Tim, a guy Lars had told her to contact about a rehearsal space. It is clear at the end that he will offer her much more than that.
"Days," the second story, is told in the first person by a woman very much like Minna except that she's a translator and her loss is presented elliptically, with only one direct mention of her ex.
She also spends her time wandering around to no purpose and recounts her days in the form of numbered lists along the mannered lines of "15. jump over the sun,/16. make contact with the universe/17. and continue on down to the laundromat." The only thing that passes for an event is that she gets her wisdom teeth pulled. And yet, she too has a little out-of-the-blue epiphany. "18. darkness darkness darkness/19. And then suddenly a greenhouse crackling warm/20. in the middle of it all."
Thinking about the formal patterns of the novellas, I surmise that the monotone of the first is meant to evoke the daily and often tedious experience of suffering, while the second reduces a life to a to-do list, not of chores and obligations per se, but the daily experience of living and acting (or not acting), grinding out the mostly ordinary days.
But the stylization does nothing much for the experience. The characters' tedium shouldn't translate to ours. Given that these two women lead middle-class, uneventful lives, a little more stylistic pizazz would have relieved my frequent boredom.
Brigitte Frase is a critic in Minneapolis and a past winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.
So Much for That Winter
By: Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra.
Publisher: Graywolf Press, 147 pages, $15.
