Thanks to Graywolf Press for a free advance copy of this title, which was published on Feb 2, 2021. I'm leaving this review voluntarily:

Danish writer Dorthe Nors is an expert of minimalist fiction; her short "slice of life" pieces seem simple in subject and form, but big emotional upheaval and subtle unsettling undercurrents linger in the background and around the edges of all her stories. This collection contains fourteen odd little writings. In each case, the audience is left with a lot of space for questions and assumptions, in the gaps between what Nors carefully chooses to say and what she leaves out.

In one story, a man is trapped in a deer stand, hoping for rescue while worrying about the presence of wolves. In another, a women collects money for a fake cancer charity while mourning a relationship. A writer encounters a woman who's worried she'll be written about. A man attempts to have an affair, but ends up embroiled in a painfully awkward gathering of his lover's family. These seemingly mundane works about daily life tend to reverberate with feelings of ominous menace, like a worrisome threat is fast approaching. Nors nails the kind of depression and anxiety that often constantly underpins the present moment, even moments that seem innocuous.

Nors is an interesting read--definitely an author whose work inspires some serious contemplation. She's got that impactful brevity of a Lydia Davis or a Diane Williams. I think, in terms of my own taste, I slightly prefer the work of Norwegian author Gunnhild Øyehaug: she's a bit funnier and weirder.

Dorthe Nors is a master of short fiction. In each of the 14 stories in her new collection Wild Swims, Nors guides us through the worst parts of our modern humanity, of the dull ache of the suburbs and our amputation from the wild, of selfish detachment and narcissism, alienation, frustration, and simple manipulations. The misery of these characters range from those suffering from festering wounds to fruiting bruises to simple emptiness, their pain and disappointments suffered or inflicted on others described with a clinical glance by the author.

Nors’ work is brilliant. It’s terrible and cold and TRUE.

I am often guilty of reading nothing at all about a book before I start it - not the cover nor end pages or summary from the publisher - which is why I didn’t realize I was reading short, disconnected pieces until I reached the fourth story. The digital book has no page breaks between pieces (the new stories are introduced with a section heading) and the rhythm of each piece was so in tune, the narrators so alike, that I was dazed but waiting for them to be stitched together. Honestly, I could have gone on with the whole book that way and not been disappointed.

My sincere thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for giving me the opportunity to devour this ARC. Thank you for bringing us the goods in women in translation!

I’m judging a 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory
glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

“He’s sitting in a deer stand, and something’s happened to the light. A mist is rising. It creeps toward him across the crowberry bushes. Which means that evening is closing in again. He wanted to be alone, so that’s what he is now.”
This beginning is so beautiful. Can’t wait to read on.

A nice set of short stories. They were all interesting but none of them really stood out in my mind. I love the author's writing style so I think that I would prefer to read a novel by her rather than short stories. Many of the stories seemed like they were setting up for something good and then it would just end. I would love to pick up a novel from the author to read since I loved her writing style, which is very character focused.

About four or five years ago, the Danish concept of hygge gained traction in North America, engendering the publication and sales of various tomes, which, for the price of $24.95, promised to guide the overworked and unfulfilled American population to blissful, cozy fulfillment. Hygge is both a term and a way of life. This practice — meant to bring contentment and well-being through manifestations of coziness, like fireplaces and cashmere socks—was an appealing
alternative to a way of living that optimized productivity over leisure and comfort. But even coziness can start to feel suffocating—the fire gets too hot; the socks too impractical. It’s this discomfort within comfort explored in “Hygge,” a story from Wild Swims, the new short story collection from Danish author Dorthe Nors. First published in Danish in 2018, the collection’s English translation was released in North America last month by Graywolf Press. A collection of fourteen stories, Wild Swims addresses loss, isolation, longing, and the specters of melancholy. The stories in the collection are cerebral: they’re centered around characters suspended in memory, individuals that desperately grasp for the past to explain an unforgiving present.

In “Hygge,” a professor is engaged in a relationship with a woman that he thinks very little of: she is one of many “cast-off women and their expectations” at the senior club to which he’s recently become a member. Although the professor has chosen to spend his time with this woman, whose name is Lilly, his disdain is palpable. He is disgusted by her home, its “bathroom littered with laundry” and its “sweetish smell of urine.” He associates this latter detail with his Aunt Clara, who he had been forced to spend afternoons with as a child.

Despite the years that have surely passed, the professor maintains a childish resentment towards those boyhood afternoons, and it infects the time he spends with Lilly. In some ways, the professor sees no distinction between his aunt and his current lover: Both are alcoholics whose loneliness he is forced to manage. He resents this responsibility: “I’ve never understood why Aunt Clara’s loneliness required my involvement.” Though he is referring to his aunt, this admission could be just as easily applied to Lilly.

Following 2014’s Karate Chop, Nors’s second story collection is masterful in its compression of time; the professor’s recollection traverses hours and years, yet it feels like it happens in the briefest of moments. The story’s title is, of course, ironic: even in the most hygge of settings—candles, blankets, crackling fires—sourness prevails. In fact, in Nors’ “Hygge,” coziness turns sinister; after Lilly implores the professor to “just be cozy,” the story ends with Lilly lying on the floor, “eyes gawping” and the professor declaring his defense.

Many of the stories in the collection take this shape. Seemingly sweet, unassuming moments are interrupted by gray realities. In “Inside St. Paul’s,” at the tomb of “Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount” a man grapples with his own insignificance. Shocked by the relative warmth of the sarcophagus, he recalls the cold of the hockey rink he visited as a child with his father and brother. As a boy, the man dreamed of achieving a greatness equal to the hockey players skating in “wide, confident circles.” Faced with the warm and ill-preserved body of Sir Nelson, “dead, and easily defeatable,” the smallness of the man’s life is thrown into stark perspective. He attempts to recreate his childhood feelings of ambition but ends up feeling more dejected. In “On Narrow Paved Paths,” a busybody comes to terms with her impending death by managing the illness and consequent death of a close friend. In “The Fairground,” a deserted fairground, “trampled and singed,” acts as a metaphor for a woman’s disillusionment with love.

In these stories, love and success are always just out of grasp, while isolation, illness, and death remain constants. Nors’ spare and precise prose makes these feelings of insecurity and despair so tangible that reading these stories is an unsettling experience.

Full of strange and shocking stories, Wild Swims will both confuse you and make you laugh out loud. The stories are quick and easy to read, but you’ll want to sit with them and dissect every little detail.

Isn't this just the best exploration of the human condition that you'll have read in years? Listen: You've heard throughout your reading life that so-and-so doesn't waste a single word in his/her prose. This is the absolute truth for Nors - 14 tiny short stories, each a portrait or snapshot of layers of humanity we all share, have experienced, or sometimes observe in those around us. Depending on your approach to the stories, they can be open-ended puzzles or come together as a nightmare in the making based only on a few select words in the last paragraph. It's a dizzying affair, reading these stories. You know from the start that Nors knows the value of a word; I'd find my eyes galloping through the story to reach the end, to see the resolution unfold before my eyes, sometimes surreptitiously. Good lord.

If Nors knows the value of a word, the same can easily be said of this work's translator, Misha Hoekstra. Strip away the cover and front pages of the book, and you'd never known it wasn't originally written in English. That can't be said of every translation out there. Hoekstra translates with aplomb, and I look forward to reading the other pieces Nors wrote that he's translated. A winning combination, if we can base it on this book alone.

Maybe I was just in the right mood for this slim book of perversely subtle short stories, but I really enjoyed it, from cover to cover.

Sincere thanks to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for giving me the opportunity to devour this ARC. More like this, please!

I very much enjoyed these condensed, elliptical stories, each seemingly slight on the surface but carrying with them a depth of unease that lingers on after reading. I love how Nors leaves space for the reader to stitch together seemingly random bits of information that each character reveals, letting us re-arrange the pieces to create strange new whole.

This was my third book by Nors; it won't be my last.

I hadn’t heard of the current Instagrammable phenomenon of “Wild Swimming” (apparently, simply the act of swimming in any natural body of water) before I read this book, but having googled the title and reading the extra information that incidentally came up, I can see that this makes for a brilliant (English) title for this collection of short stories. The main pushback against the trend of Wild Swimming is that it’s mostly indulged in by wealthy, white urbanites — people so removed from the natural world that they fetishise and valorise acts that their poorer, rural neighbours enjoy as routine and accessible — and throughout the fourteen (very) short stories in Wild Swims, we meet a variety of characters (who might well all be privileged, white urbanites) who all seem to be suffering from modern forms of disconnection: from themselves, from their partners, from decency itself. Author Dorthe Nors frequently shocks her characters with memories bubbling up coldly, as from an underground spring, to add discomfort to their current placidity; the past and present shift seamlessly over the course of brief paragraphs and sentences, and the writing is not so much stream-of-consciousness as swirl-of-ponderence. Characters are fully fleshed with precisely captured moments, the narratives are unpredictable but credible, and the situations made me wince and snort and sigh as people attempted to, as in the title story, fight their way up salmon ladders in search of still waters. (I will note that in the original Danish, this collection was titled “Kort over Canada” — which I translated as “A Map of Canada” — and as the character from Pershing Square has a fantasy of pretending to be Canadian based on stereotypes about the country as dull and decent, I’d say, as a Canadian myself, that’s a type of disconnect from reality, too.) I don’t believe I’ve read a Danish author before, but as these stories are set all over the world, I don’t know if there’s anything pointedly Danish about them (note: the story Hygge made me quite uncomfortable, so that’s a disconnect from the stereotype that felt nicely ironic), and I would love to read more from Nors. This collection provided an enriching, if too brief, reading experience.

Wild Swims is a collection of short stories centered on odd occurrences of everyday longing and dissatisfaction: the opening story presents an accusatory stream of consciousness of a man hiding out on a deer stand after an argument with his wife; in “honeysuckle” a man fixates on a young blind woman, experiencing a strange face blindness of his own; in the title story, a woman’s recollection of the delights and trepidation of a childhood friendship brings her to the local pool. Nors’ style is spare and direct, most stories starting mid-action and cutting off without much resolution. There’s nonetheless a conversational warmth to these stories, which feature moments of perceptive and striking imagery. While certain stories offer levity, an unsettling foreboding hangs over much of the collection. These stories are tightly coiled, offering no easy resolutions, but encounters that trouble the mind well past reading.

This short story collection is well-written, but not to my taste. The prose is sparse and reads as being detached and cold. I enjoyed two stories of the collection, but the rest of them I did not connect with. I don't know if it was the translation process or if that is the style of the author. For the right audience, this book will be well received.

Advanced copy provided courtesy of the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Interesting collection of short, yet thought provoking stories about seemingly mundane moments in life.

Excellent "flash" fiction - I put flash in quotations because unlike a flash of lightning, these stories made me think about them for hours, in spite of their ~10-page length. Nors writes successful, focused short stories, portraying a central dread undermining all of her characters' attempts to attain peace.

Dorthe Nors had a simple beat to each of her stories, they were rife with the common experiences and she left things to your imagination. The stories seemed to enter into experiences that had the ability to go to something big, but they seemed to go flat and disintegrate into the common experiences. Her stories seemed to bring you into them and then left you feeling "What the heck." But you kept going wondering if things would get better, I seemed to enjoy it after a while.