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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY An exhilarating, moving account of life on the wild Danish coast, from one of Denmark's most acclaimed writers 'A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast' Katherine May, author of Wintering This is the story of the windswept coastline that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to the Netherlands, a world of shipwrecks and storm surges, of cold-water surfers and resolute sailors' wives. In spellbinding prose, award-winning writer Dorthe Nors invites the reader to travel through the landscape where her family lived for generations and which she now calls home. It is an extraordinarily powerful and beautiful journey through history and memory - the landscape's as well as her own. ________ FURTHER PRAISE FOR A LINE IN THE WORLD 'A place brimming with memories and strangeness, where storms surge and lighthouses blink... fascinating' Financial Times'A singular prose stylist... Nors is such a great companion, honest and curious and surprising' Max Porter, author of Lanny 'Brilliant... a personal, poetic meditation on this remote edge of windswept landscapes and wildwaters' New York Times 'The perfect winter read, making a virtue of dark nights and frost-bitten winds on the author's native North Sea coast' Observer 'A deep dive into a coastal landscape, both breathtaking and hypnotic' Natasha Carthew, author of Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience
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Seitenzahl: 251
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Winner of the 2022 Blixen Prize
‘Dorthe Nors is one of those rare authors who can bring a place to the page so that you forget the outside world… There are lines of such astonishing beauty in this book, that I find myself circling back to them like landmarks in their own right’
TANYA SHADRICK, AUTHOR OF THE CURE FOR SLEEP
‘A deep dive into a coastal landscape, both breathtaking and hypnotic, it is a journey towards your own heart and what it means to truly belong’
NATASHA CARTHEW, AUTHOR OF UNDERCURRENT: A CORNISH MEMOIR OF POVERTY, NATURE AND RESILIENCE
‘A Line in the World is… a confluence of eons, of feeling, of inarticulable precision – and it pulled me under… Such scope is a feat… which only an artist of Nors’s calibre can catch’
JAKOB GUANZON, AUTHOR OF ABUNDANCE
‘A strong, personal and moving portrait of a landscape and of a mind… breathtaking, hypnotic, consoling’
GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG, AUTHOR OF PRESENT TENSE MACHINE
‘With an eye for detail, humour, and poetry, Dorthe Nors captures part of the coastal people’s soul through her own memories, and passes it on to the rest of us, so that we can feel for ourselves how it relates to us’
JUDGES OF THE BLIXEN PRIZE
Praise for Dorthe Nors
‘It’s a joy to be in the hands of a writer as funny and playful with form as Dorthe Nors is, a writer who trusts her readers to be adults, to figure it out, to make the connections themselves’
LAUREN GROFF
‘Reading Nors’s work, one is reminded of the thrills and dangers of living’
YIYUN LI
‘Nors’s writing creeps up on you and then overwhelms you with its emotional power. She is a master’
CHRIS KRAUS
‘Dorthe Nors is a writer of moments – quiet, raw portraits of existential meditation’
PARIS REVIEW
CONTENTS
The Line
It’s early summer and far beneath me is a coastline. I have it folded out, a map on my desk. It begins to emerge at the northernmost tip of Jutland in Denmark. Yes, that’s where it begins, in the North Sea, on a tapering spit of sandy ground. Then it drops south like a slope. It meanders downwards. Now it has begun, the line. It charts a coast and continues, curving faintly outwards. Then come the cervical vertebrae. They settle one by one, stacked each on top of another, sandy islands. And the line persists, breaking borders, into Germany and on. The islands settle like smaller delicate vertebrae into Holland, now charting not a line but a living being.
A rugged Northern European coastline of roughly 600 miles, from Skagen in Denmark to Den Helder in Holland. From a northern sandy spit wedging itself between Norway and Sweden’s unyielding massifs down to the Wadden Sea, where the birds take rest, the hours are counted and the living being whispers.
The line has been a part of me since the beginning. Physically, but on large maps in classrooms too, on television, in the A–Z in my parents’ car. Seen in context with the rest of the country, it looks like the back of a dozy Jutlander with a silly cap and big nose, facing east. Always read from top to bottom, from left to right. Never turned on its head, fragmented, joined or transgressional. On the map beneath me, the land lies as it lies. A distant coast. Unfamiliar and raw, considered from a centre of power. At one time there were scarcely any roads across the broad heaths of the Jutland peninsula to the shores of the North Sea, and there were no bridges between Denmark’s countless islands, large and small: the land was matted, impenetrable. But today the distance between this border and its faraway metropolises is largely psychological. There are roads into the system now, bridges over the water, airports and civilized infrastructure. The land coheres, and now it’s spread on the desk beneath me, fixed by a map-maker.
But if I could do what I wanted with time, if I could accelerate it like a piece of time-lapse footage where the roses turn from bud to blossom, the line would be alive. The drawing would always be moving. It would bend forwards, shift backwards, open, turn, perforate; then close, then open up again. It would vanish in part beneath heavy masses of ice but be revived as something else, and it would dance, its tail one moment twisting like an eel, fluttering the next like a pennant. It is a living coastline made of sand. Always becoming, always dying. Determined by the forces of the galaxy streaming through the universe, marked by the storms, the wandering of the sun and moon, and human intervention (although the latter is always short-lived), the coastline has all the time in the world. It is a long and living tale of tidal waters, subject to the rhythms of day and night, but, in its reckoning of time, to be considered an eternity.
One line in the world. Just one. It could have been elsewhere and known other experiences, other dramas and silent reflections. What might the line from Utqiaġvik, Alaska to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico have to tell? Myriads. Or the line from Gibraltar to the Cape of Good Hope? There are no borders to the stories told along a line. But a landscape is beyond the telling, like the telling is beyond itself. It takes a person to take up the line somewhere, to open, look and make a cut. This coming year it’ll be me, gently guiding the scalpel as I write.
At first I didn’t want to. I was supposed to be starting a novel. Then I was approached to write a book about the west coast of Denmark. I said no. They asked me again. And again. I said, ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ and I did. Or I dreamt. In the dream, I was setting off across the landscape in my little Toyota. I saw myself escaping several years of pressure from the media by driving up and down the coast. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.
My own geography began in a suburb of Herning, Denmark’s answer to Denver, Colorado or Manchester, England. A young, imaginative, knocked-together provincial town in the middle of the Jutish heath. When I was four, my family moved five miles west. My parents bought a tumbledown farm in the large parish of Sinding-Ørre. One half of the parish: green, lush, hilly. The other half: vast stretches of heath and forest beneath a kind of prairie sky, and from the moment I dared to move from place to place of my own accord, I went walking in the landscape. That parish is the only place on Earth where I know all the shortcuts, all the paths, and I know who lived in which house and whose children were whose. I know all the family names on the gravestones. When I come to die, that is where you should bury me.
My family was tied to the place where we lived, but beyond that, we were oriented west. That was where our kin came from; the coastline was our place of origin. My family has had a little house tucked away in a deserted backwater out there all my life. And when on warm days we itched for a quick trip to the beach, we drove plumb west. This was the fastest way to the sea, driving in a straight line until we hit Vedersø Dune. Then we walked across the sand, laden with blankets, thermos flasks and cool boxes.
It was there, one day when I was eleven, that I was nearly dragged out to sea by a wave. I was holding my mother’s hand; it was August. In those days I wasn’t familiar with the currents, and I didn’t appreciate their strength. But as we walked along the beach, letting the waves splash around our ankles, one of them dragged me out. My mother grabbed my leg, and we both skidded on the shingle until it let us go. Afterwards we sat and cried a bit. Grazes on our legs, blood. My mother was clutching my hand and wouldn’t let go. Since then I’ve called them Valkyrie waves, the kind that rove in from the North Sea in long, elegant swells on otherwise mild days. They’ll take you to sea if they can. I’m afraid of them, and every time I see them, I remember love.
While my family was oriented in a westerly direction, the rest of Denmark was looking east. That was where the big cities were, and thus the university places. It was the direction you migrated if you wanted to ‘amount to anything’, as they put it. You had to urbanize, speak proper Danish, live up to your potential over in the east.
It was a shift grounded in the past. In the Middle Ages there was a strong centre of power in Viborg, in central Jutland, but the balance tipped towards Copenhagen, and it’s never the losers who get the chance to write history. In the eighteenth century, the golden age of Danish art, painters were exhorted to depict landscapes that defined what the real Denmark looked like. The nation’s true nature was to be found around Copenhagen, and it looked like a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, a Biedermeier idyll, bare of squalls, wilderness and drifting sands. If the harsh natural world at the periphery was described, it was mostly by the wasteland’s priests and parish clerks, who wrote educational tracts about the rows of dunes, about drainage and property rights. Generally viewed from above, looking down. Or with a hunter’s gaze, within range and at arm’s length.
Women’s relationships with the landscape were relatively undocumented. Their feeling for nature was at best irrelevant, at worst dangerous. But now I have claimed the right to see and to describe. The landscape must have an essence that, in itself, can speak. Something that cannot be captured with compasses and spirit levels, that cannot be made harmless with weapons.
I was in contact with this something when I was a child, but like many other bookworms of my generation, I also travelled east. In my first paper at Aarhus University’s Department of Scandinavian Studies, I wrote: ‘It is in the schism that all identity is formed.’ I wrote that sentence in a concrete building in Aarhus, with a view towards the place I came from. A terribly long way from home.
When I think about it now, it feels as though the schism in which all identity is formed made me sew great tacking stitches into the world. I was drawn east, but then back west. I specialized in Swedish language and literature. Looking east, in other words. But it was the Danish and English languages that preoccupied me in everyday life, so west—no, east, zig-zig, zag-zag. I zigzagged until I ended up in Copenhagen, and one day, after several years in the city, I was lying on the floor of my apartment. I had hash dealers below and a young woman who blasted loud music next door. When I pulled back the curtains in the morning, I found myself looking out at a hairdresser’s and a block of flats. There was no courtyard to speak of, nothing, only some nearby churchyards and parks. Every day, I tried to find the landscape I missed in one of the metropolis’s green spaces, but I was never alone. Never myself. And so I lay there on the floor above the dealers. I’d downloaded an app that played nature sounds from Bornholm, an island in the Baltic Sea. I shut my eyes and listened to the water splashing and chuckling against the cliffs. As far as water noises go, you can’t get any further east in this little country. Gulls were screeching softly above the reliable sound of summer rippling. Now and again, if the nightingale wasn’t singing, another bird chirruped, a brook tinkled, a cutter sailed pleasantly towards the horizon.
I shut my eyes, as I said, and then it came: I want a storm surge, I thought. I want a north-west wind, fierce and hard. I want trees so battered and beaten they’re crawling over the ground. I want beach grass, lyme grass, crowberry stalks and heather that prick my calves until they bleed, and salt crystallizing on my skin. I want vast expanses, wasteland, wind-blasted stone, mountainous dunes and a body language I understand. I want to wake beneath a sky that is grey and miserable, but which creates a space of colossal dimensions in a second, when the light comes ashore. A horizon is what I want, and I want solitude. Healthy solitude, and I want intimacy, true intimacy. I no longer want to be anyone but myself. And then I opened my eyes and took Bornholm out of my ears. My neighbour’s everlasting, torturous bass, the smell of hash from downstairs and my romantic let-downs hard-wearing in my mind. But on the back of the living-room door was a map. I’d stuck it up there myself with tape, because you always know before you know—and then I gave up my flat. Three months’ notice. I didn’t know where I was going, but I wanted to be gone.
Alongside the quiet erosion of my life in Copenhagen, my childhood home in the big, heathy parish was being expropriated. A super-hospital was going to be built in the neighbouring parish, and a motorway laid down. The house was situated squarely on the line that the Roads Authority had drawn to mark an on-ramp. There was nothing to be done. My parents had to pack up forty years and the work of a lifetime and move a mile or so closer to the church. The last time I visited my childhood home was in January 2014. I had just left Copenhagen, my destination as yet unknown. I was living temporarily in a disused school in Dollerup Hills, four hours west of Copenhagen in the middle of Jutland, while my life as a writer had taken an international turn. I was flitting between the USA, the UK and Denmark’s outermost province—confounded, bewildered and happy—and now the place where I began was being razed to the ground.
I remember that my parents stood in the hallway when it came time for me to leave. They waited side by side, as they always did when bidding their guests goodbye. The light of the lamp, the same as always. The tiles on the floor, the door handle, the row of pegs. But their faces were going to pieces, and the moment I walked out of the door felt like cutting into flesh. It’s possible to have an unconditional relationship with a place. I let the loss consume me all the way to my makeshift lodgings. Then I had to move on; I had to shift the site I came from inside me, turning it into a memory.
One day, having just returned from a trip to New York and Minneapolis, I couldn’t stand the uncertainty a minute longer. I bought a house on the central west coast of Denmark. I had wavered long enough. I signed the contract in the pissing rain at an estate agent’s office in a rundown rural town. So be it, I thought.
‘Let’s do this,’ I said to myself, and drove off to take an extra look at the house, down a country road with a view over flapping tarps and sopping bales of hay. But far away I could see the sprawling flats and the dunes beyond, a distant and exotic range of mountains. I’ve always thought they looked like giant lazy camels, with hides of lyme grass and beach grass. A colossal herd of soft and sandy desert animals to be huddled into, sheltering from the wind. Or, on a warm summer’s day: to be cuddled, to be loved.
My new house was cheap, practical, and close to the Valkyrie wave that one mild day in 1981 had roved in from the North Sea towards the coast, elegant and combative, to affirm love and drag me with it out into the world. When he showed me the house, the estate agent had stopped at the bottom of the garden and asked me to listen to the rumbling in the distance.
‘That’s not a motorway,’ he said. ‘That’s the sea.’ I expressed the appropriate enthusiasm, but that didn’t stop him leaving the ‘For Sale’ sign in the garage. It would save him the trip, he thought. She won’t be staying long, he thought.
But I still live here by the sea. Now and again, when I’ve climbed the dunes that the locals call ‘sea mountains’ and I gaze out across the water, the words of the Swedish writer Kerstin Ekman pop into my head. I wrote my dissertation on her, and she has stayed with me throughout my life.
‘I have come here often,’ she writes. ‘A whole childhood, every single day. All these arrivals are false, because in reality I was born here. Here I can do nothing but return.’1
But that’s just one side of the coin, Kerstin, I think. The other is this: the place you come from is not somewhere you can ever return. It no longer exists, and you have become a stranger. Too urbanized, too acculturated, too loud to assimilate, but all identity is formed in the schism. I will never escape it, and of course I knew that even when I was young. So now I sew my geographical stitches between this coastal world and the savage city. I need the plurality, the conversations, the invisibility and the people. But I cannot cope without the landscape, without nature. I need a broad, still place to which I can return. A horizon. Some friendly, level-headed neighbours. My own place, and a point of departure, where I don’t necessarily know all the names on the gravestones, but where I know the light, the scent, the meaning of the shifting winds, and where all the time that’s running out is raised up in the telling of a story and snatches its piece of eternity. Before we come apart.
So there it is, the coastline far below me. I’m standing on it in my house on the central west coast, while simultaneously looking down upon it in map form on my desk. I have lifted myself above it for a moment, but for the next year, I will sink myself into it. I shall let it draw me wherever it pleases. I will not let my movements be dictated by the fixed conventions of reading a map: north to south, west to east. I will look at it as a line and dive into it the way one dives into text. It is necessity that will guide me—and seasons, coincidence and memory. I’m not looking for some trumped-up truth about a particular piece of geography. Humans, with our kerosene and our short fuses, have been ranting and raving in nature for far too long. As much as possible, I’d rather be open to the truth that arises between me and the place, at the moment we meet. This is what will happen: I will set off humbly in my restless Toyota. I will find my way with the discarded A–Z that my parents gave me when I told them I was embarking on this project.
‘You’ll need this,’ they said.
All the pages with maps of the North Sea are falling out. They’ve driven up and down the coast so often in the course of their long lives that the landscape in their book is scarred, furrowed and wrinkled. Coffee stains are legion, and they have entrusted to me a not insignificant legacy. I will grope my way forwards in it. Have faith. I know other people’s stories are out there in their thousands, but this is my encounter with the place where the light comes ashore, where the sea meets the beach, whips up, calms, sits up at the table like a creative child, puts greaseproof paper over the map and finds a pencil. The land, now, is engulfed in fog. But I draw a single stroke by following the line I can make out. So there it is, itself, and I shall meet it. See, look—it’s moving, the line. It’s dancing like a dervish.
References
1 Kerstin Ekman, En by af lys (‘A City of Light’), Gyldendal 1983.
The Shortest Night
Midsummer. The pace of growth can’t keep this up. The corn is turning from green to golden, and everything draws energy from the sun. Today is the longest day. The shortest night lies ahead.
I walked in the heat from the rented cabin on the top of Skallerup Dune, around forty miles south of the northernmost tip of the country, down to the water, amid the scent of rosehips, Rosa rugosa, sweetbriar roses, dog roses, roses everywhere. The soil is fat and damp. Yellow water lilies grow in the hollows. Sediment deposited in the Ice Age continues all the way down to the water’s edge; the dunes have verdant skin. On the beach, there are preparations for a Midsummer’s Eve bonfire. Some children, it must have been, have made a witch with stiff broomstick arms and a wild look in her felt-tip eyes.
It’s the time of year when we burn a female doll. It’s a tradition, an annual thing in Denmark, an act that has clicked into place. We Danes are more or less in agreement: all of this is a game we play. Burning the evil has its roots in ancient rituals and seventeenth century witches at the stake—we can agree on that too. But it’s only in the past century that the ritual has come into fashion, and whether it’s a cosy custom or a problem is something to be discussed over strawberries picked for the celebration. She will be burned. Tonight, as legend tells, she will fly to Brocken and Hekla: dispatched like sparks above a bonfire, she and her sister witches will celebrate their sabbath on the mountains there. It’s a Midsummer’s Eve party: a celebration of cleansing and the solstice. The light is here, but the darkness is as well, and now the great wheel turns. We walk to the holy springs and wash our wounds. Herbs in the woods and meadows have drunk from the energies of the universe and drawn rich growth from all existence. We pick the herbs at night, on our guard against the glow-worms’ bite. We read omens. We tuck flowers under our pillows. Our brown calves are wet with cuckoo spit, while the bonfires burn down. It is the longest day, the magic’s night. Everything has opened and yielded. A rattling door onto the darkness. We burn a female doll in that opening, and I’ve never felt much like taking part.
When I was a child, a man caught fire at a Midsummer celebration my family was attending. It was the host. He’d built the witch himself the day before, out of a couple of brooms tied crosswise. He had doused the bonfire liberally with petrol that afternoon, but before the burning, he thought it could do with one more drop. I saw the thing myself—him running around in his nylon shirt with a jerrycan, sloshing petrol onto the fire. We saw, too, the lighter, the spark, the catching, and how someone flung themselves on top of him to extinguish the flames. They rolled him around on the ground and crouched beside him on their haunches as the bonfire burned. It was such a silent, mild night. We could follow the sound of the ambulance all the way from the hospital in the city to far out in the countryside, where we stood, and where the party was over.
It seems impossible to think that this landscape will strike back with savage force in autumn, and that the trees will again be pressed against the earth. That the people now striding straight as rods will need to walk sideways before long. The salt will settle over the beach meadows and on the windows, which will need to be washed again and again. Everything is clear and tender around Midsummer’s Eve, and now even here, where nature is harshest, it’s soft. Soft and thriftless, I thought, as I stood on the beach and watched a naked Norwegian trying to put on his underpants without falling over. His wife didn’t want to come out of the water; his dog had run away. To the south, Rubjerg Knude, a grand ridge of sand; to the north, Hirtshals Lighthouse. Longing for shadow, I went back to the cabin. Then I drove a little way north to Tornby, an area of dunes and scrub and trees, bringing a packed lunch.
Up there the woods were full of honeysuckle, tiny springs with water lilies, ferns, sparrow vetch and wood sorrel. Brown tracks bored into green tunnels. Somewhere among the trees I stood silently for a long time, watching a deer with a fawn. She was grazing, the mother, the little one following. I’m in the way here, I thought, and sat down on a rotten stump with my packed lunch, wood ants scurrying beneath me. Above, the intense hum of insects in the treetops. A lone bumblebee that had forgotten it could fly crawled across the forest path. I’m a foreign body, I thought. I tower above their world. My view from up here is absurd. The only point of me for the forest would be if I dropped dead on the spot and gave the little creatures a good meal.
But this was the longest day, and I walked alive through the woods. I trod carefully. I watched the flowers on the elder trees hover like small helicopters in the dim light, and let myself be drugged by the scent of honeysuckle. Maybe I stole a water lily, maybe a buttercup, and by the time I reached the soft dunes the ragworts were ready, the ticks, the mallow. I took plenty of blood-red cranesbill for myself and crouched by a toad that was resting on a stone. Then home to the cabin on the hillock above Skallerup Dune.
The sun is sinking stoically, now, towards the Norway boat. The ferry, on its way into the harbour in Hirtshals, is balanced heavily on the horizon. They’ll be on the deck, watching the coast—the visitors, the homecomers. It’s the bonfires they can see, the flames and the lighthouse. There are columns of smoke above the whole country, as though the Danes were busy sending signals, communicating from hilltops, sports fields and allotments. And if anyone aboard a ship in the strait of Skagerrak between Denmark and Norway leans over the gunwale and listens hard, they’ll hear folk singing. Yes, in this country we sing in the dusk about peace, ‘Sankte Hans, Sankte Hans.’ I’m on high ground, listening to the voices rising from the beach. They’ve lit the bonfire, and the sun has gone nuts too. I hum my own scraps of melody, as the bonfire burns out below. Then a deer crosses the meadow west of the cabin. Then a fox screams. Then the wheel turns, and to the north, the lighthouse blinks at the ferry.
It casts light onto whatever needs to find its way, the lighthouse. I know, because yesterday in broad daylight it shone a light onto me. Hirtshals Lighthouse is white and stately. Beautiful on the soft green cliffs, a fraction north of Skallerup Dune. Everything was infinitely beautiful seen from up there, the green dunes, the turquoise sea. And I could look down on the straight streets of Hirtshals from above. I could see the harbour, where the ferries sail to Norway, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. I could see a campsite. The weather was fine and I could make out a little group of bathers in the distance. Definitely beach mums, I thought. When I was a child, we usually went swimming on what they called ‘housewife beaches’, places where the local mothers and grandmothers brought their children because they were safe to swim. The young girls stand at an appropriate distance, clad in new bikinis, gold crosses and their mothers’ dialects. A sharp watch is kept on the oldest women. Their skin is tanned leather, their hair clipped short. They have tattoos and big, wrinkled cleavages. They can call a child to their side from the open sea. Now and again, a man in a boiler suit walks past and talks to them. They put up with that, but he can’t sit down. They’ve been skinning fish since before they started school. They’ve ridden Puch Maxi mopeds, they’ve gone cruising with drunken men in Ford Taunus cars by the dam. They’ve cooked more chips than you’ll ever eat. They’ve borne their stormy nights. They have cried when he was at sea, and they’ve cried when he was home, and they’re not for delicate souls. But they are safe swimmers, and if war breaks out, I’d like one of them in my trench. Her and her grandma. They’ve hauled men’s mouths over to the drain in the bathroom. When he couldn’t get up, they let him lie. When he wanted to stand, they carried him. Fat, thin, sun-creased, cigarette-smoking, bathing-suit-stretching beauties in the sand. Always swim near them, because the water is theirs.
