Dorthe Nors's Reading List

"In 2015, Naja Marie Aidt, one of Denmark’s finest writers, lost her son Carl in a horrible accident. For a while Naja thought she’d never be able to write again. Literature seemed pointless, but slowly the attempt to describe the extreme sorrow and trauma that she and her family were living through called for literature. Language came to the rescue. The result is one of the best books ever written about sorrow in Danish literary history, if you ask me. It’s heartbreaking in its description of horror, trauma and loss, but it’s also beautiful, courageous, poetic, and unforgettable. It kept me awake for a couple of nights, made me think of the ones I love, and made me think of survival and of literature as a temple where we try to heal our hurt. Naja Marie Aidt’s writing is very intense, persistent and vocal. It’s dark and fluid, it’s repetitive and daring. She gets under your skin, into your thoughts. She’s a damn good writer. To me she’s just a dark, edgy and intense writer. If anything I see more of a Nordic vølve in her—a ‘vølve’ is a female poet, a seer and witch, i.e. the intense teller of truths. I hadn’t read Baboon when I wrote Karate Chop so if there’s a resemblance it must come from the language we share, Danish. “She gets under your skin, into your thoughts. She’s a damn good writer” I think they both circle around the darker sides of relationships, but most good fiction does that, doesn’t it? I think we’re both very much our own writers with mutual respect for each other’s instrumentation of the narrative and the language. In short: a novel is like an opera—many scenes, many characters, a lot of words. A short story is more like a lied —one strong voice, one theme, carried out as intense and targeted as possible to the very end. I like both forms."

"He came from the ghetto in Aarhus and had spent most of his childhood and youth in and out of institutions. He had a criminal background, he also had a background of writing rap lyrics and more than anything what is important for us: he was—and is—extremely talented as a poet. He was 18 when his poems were published and they blew us away. The fuss is about him being the most original, talented, vocal poet we have seen for decades. He came from a place nobody expected, he mixed other traditions in his language, he gave voice to a generation and a population that was never heard. There was no compromise in his poetry, there was no sense of future, and thinking back it was the lack of future that made Yahya Hassan’s poetry burn from the pages like something we hadn’t seen burn in Danish literature for a long while back then. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And then of course it became political, because Yahya Hassan was attacking his own background as well as the ethnic Danes, the hypocrites on all sides were getting beaten up by this young desperado. It was quite a debut! He’s vocal, he sometimes chants his poetry; a trend that is a little too used in Danish literature, if you ask me, and that he was of course inspired by, but he chants in a way that almost sounds like the imam of the local mosque. But there the resemblance stopped because he was not chanting what imam’s might be chanting. Far off. There’s also some rap tradition in his voice and he writes in capitals. LIKE THIS! AS IF HE’S SCREAMING! IN YOUR FACE!"

"It’s an essay about the double nature of writing. That the writer has a persona that is pushed in front of him or her, a persona that faces the world; and then there’s the person who writes the books in seclusion. How do these two characters work together? How does the surrounding world perceive them? The amazing thing about this book-length essay is that she manages to describe this so it becomes a description of the dual faces of all people. At the same time she unfolds her own reality up against the fiction she writes and she tries to describe the creative process. I enjoyed it very much. I actually enjoyed reading it more than the texts Margarite Duras has written on the same themes. Det är natten was on the Swedish bestseller lists for quite a while which is pretty impressive for a book-length essay. I hope it will be translated someday. It’s a story about a young woman whose lover—and the father of her infant girl Dream—has gone to prison, and now she’s left alone with the responsibility of parenting and cleaning up after the criminal mess her partner has left her in. It’s a book about loneliness, about survival and the ambivalent feelings we have for those we love; our friends, our children, our partners. It’s a dark novel with a very sensual and sharp eye."

"I personally didn’t find the read painful at all. I just love this book and the smartness of it so much, and I laughed out loud many times while reading it. It makes you feel a bit awkward as Lena Andersson, in a sublime and phenomenological way, investigates and portrays the nature of being in love. “Love is a sort of illness that only the absolute loss of hope will cure you of” What she finds is that it can be described in other ways than we’re used to, and yes, it is a sort of illness, a character disorder, a kind of insanity that only the absolute loss of hope will cure you of. Any person who’s been hopelessly in love during their lifetime will read this and recognize themselves, feeling a bit ashamed but also incredibly relieved to find that love is a condition that can be described through philosophy, humour and literature. Lena Andersson is a literary philosopher. She investigates, researches, contemplates, twists and turns and tries to see stuff from new angles. In the process she sheds a light on things you’d never thought about before. She’s minimalist, she’s smart and funny and should be read slowly and with delight."

"Well, I got to know Sjón through his literature first. Or at least I thought so. But then it turned out that he was a member of a band that I listened to quite a lot when I was a teenager, The Sugarcubes. It didn’t make him less interesting, I agree! But I did fall for Sjón’s talent through his written art more than anything—and I’d haven’t listened to his music for decades, since I turned 22. He is rooted in an Icelandic tradition where magical realism is strong, but he’s also a minimalist and a poet. He’s quite enigmatic, strange and playful and very musical, of course. There’s a strong sense of timing in his writing. I feel he’s breaking literary ground every time he writes something and I enjoy reading his literature very much. It takes place in Reykjavik during the Spanish flu. The pandemic swipes through the Icelandic capital and we follow a young call boy, Mani, who’s drifting in and out of sexual encounters, and who’s balancing on a feverishly thin line between life and death. The narrative felt fluid to me, and yet graphic. It was like it was written in black chalk, dusty, transparent, and very graphic. It’s like an artwork while also being a really good story about sexuality, ecstasy, illness—and death. He’s very much an outsider, and like Ramquist’s character left on his own fighting for survival under difficult circumstances. I agree that in their loneliness and the way they’re dealing with a life in the shadows, in the back alleys and in the underbelly of the city, they resemble each other. “I feel Sjón is breaking literary ground every time he writes something” Sjón is just less of a realist than Ramquist. He takes his writing to the surreal instead. It’s the Icelandic tradition, I guess. Things are dwelling in volcanoes, in glaciers, in the tundra, under the stones. You’ll have to read it for yourself. He takes the narrative to a completely surprising place, and he does it with such coolness and precision. You should not try to write such and ending at home. You will injure yourself. Just don’t do it. But, please, read Sjón."