A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
by Dorthe Nors, translated by Caroline Waight
Graywolf Press, 2022. $16.00
Reviewed by Whitney (Walters) Jacobson
When I first read the title of Dorthe Nors’ essay collection, A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast (translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight, Graywolf Press, 2022), I wrongly presumed she’d be writing about her experiences sailing along the shoreline. Instead, Nors strives to delineate the ever-changing coastline, the borderland “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
Each essay focuses on a different location along the North Sea coast of Denmark and investigates the question, what do we know? In formulating her response, Nors scrutinizes both the sea and the land: a duality that compels her toward nuanced answers:
Living with the water and off the water takes arrogance and submission at the same time. Profit is growth. At stake is life . . . and I think of Hvide Sande. How it feels in your body when a storm comes ashore. It's like the water doesn’t want to cede power, and the land doesn’t want to put up with any more violence. So they fight, and then they reconcile, then they are whipped up once again. (119)
Nors scaffolds information for readers into layers. She initially offers an approachable but ultimately unsatisfying answer which sets her up to scan below the surface like a radar for underlying caches of information. These repositories of culture, environmentalism, inheritance, human impact, myth, time, and life make for rich storytelling and meaning making.
The metaphors Nors weaves within each essay also serve to underscore her message. Each time she returns to an analogy, the perspective is more nuanced. In the essay “Wadden Sea Suite,” which may be my favorite in the collection for the sonic comparisons threaded through it, Nors writes, “My year in Sønderho is a cello’s sound inside me….The silent space, a lonely string instrument, and then that long-suffering bending to the wandering of the moon and the clock of the tides” (131). Her later reflection adds depth to the metaphor:
It affected you, the Wadden Sea and its tidal pulse. The natives knew that. Births got underway as waters rose, they said. Those due to die died when the waters receded . . . I used to walk down Nord Land street every night, up to the dike, listening . . . and when I shut my eyes, I could hear the silence of the Wadden Sea, like some kind of resonance . . . Perhaps the cello’s sound was coming from the deeps, from the tideways. Perhaps I’d brought it out there myself. Perhaps it couldn’t be any other way. (Nors 138-139)
Still later, reflecting on Johanne, who housed her on the island, Nors pulls the strands of her experience together as she asserts, “I don’t know if she died at a falling tide, but I know she had the Wadden Sea so deep down inside her soul that she can’t possibly be anywhere but here. And so I stood, listening to the silence some way out, the stringed instrument” (143). The cord in each essay was often picked up at an unanticipated turn, and thus the repetition gained momentum like the waves Nors studies: building before a crest of insight that ultimately crashes on the reader in the conclusion.
While the book is made cohesive by the writer’s voice and each essay’s consistent approach to the subject, it is a true essay collection. Each of the fourteen essays can stand fully on its own and doesn’t rely on those prior to it for significance.
It is also worth noting that Nors often writes from the periphery. She is present in the landscape but not usually the focus. Perhaps these features are what caused me to feel a bit lost in terms of traveling up the coast, but my presumptions about the book may also have had a residual effect on my experience reading the collection.
Nevertheless, Nors’ adept usage of sensory detail to highlight the landscape’s autonomy, despite humanity’s best efforts to control it, makes the text as rich as the place’s history and creates resonance to readers unfamiliar with the line: “The passing sun plays through the water on all the things we have forgotten, or never came to know. The past plays out in depths haunted by shadows” (76).
Whitney (Walters) Jacobson holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University Moorhead. Her poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in Punctuate, Feminine Collective, Up North Lit, After the Pause, and In the Words of Womyn International, among other publications. She is currently working on a collection of essays exploring skills, objects, and traits passed on (or not) from generation to generation. She maintains a curiosity in memoir and the themes of feminism, water, inheritance, blue-collar work, and grief.