So Much for That Winter
Novellas
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Dorthe Nors follows up her acclaimed story collection Karate Chop with a pair of novellas that playfully chart the aftermath of two very twenty-first-century romances. In "Days," a woman in her late thirties records her life in a series of lists, giving shape to the tumult of her days--one moment she is eating an apple, the next she is on the floor, howling like a dog. As the details accumulate, we experience with her the full range of emotions: anger, loneliness, regret, pain, and also joy, as the lists become a way to understand, connect to, and rebuild her life.
In "Minna Needs Rehearsal Space," a novella told in headlines, an avant-garde musician is dumped via text message. Fleeing the indignity of the breakup and friends who flaunt their achievements in life, career, and family, Minna unfriends people on Facebook, listens to Bach, and reads Ingmar Bergman, then decamps to an island near Sweden, "well suited to mental catharsis." A cheeky nod to the listicles and bulletins we scroll through on a daily basis, So Much for That Winter explores how we shape and understand experience, and the disconnection and dislocation that define our twenty-first-century lives, with Nors's unique wit and humor.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These two experimental novellas from Nors (Karate Chop) follow artists through personal and aesthetic crises after breakups. The first, "Minna Needs Rehearsal Space," shows Nors's economy and perceptiveness, and outshines the second, "Days." Minna is a Copenhagen avant-garde composer working on a sonata of tonal rows, the rules of which the author mirrors in syntax: repetition, inversion, and reordering of a limited set. The resulting "see Spot run" style would be merely cutesy in less talented hands. Minna is "in many ways desperate," recently dumped via text and at odds with the women in her life. Coffee with Jette, a harpist who dates married men, agitates Minna's professional and romantic anxieties. Karin, happy in the hinterlands, "brags about motocross, sex, and pork sausage." Their email volleys exemplify the story's dry humor. Minna learns of her mother's disappointment at her childlessness through her blog. Her domineering sister hounds her all the way to a Baltic island, where Minna finally outruns cell phone service and the reader is treated to a cathartic and suspenseful climax. This rich social world is almost entirely absent from "Days," a sort of diary burdened with inscrutable line-numbering. Here, the pang of romantic loss is squelched by vagueness, and the self-absorbed writer protagonist insists on sharing her melodramatic appreciations of graveyards. Fortunately, Nors's fine-grained renderings of ordinary moments periodically zap the world back to life.
