Status
Available
Genres
Publication
Graywolf Press (2021), Edition: Reprint, 128 pages
Description
"In fourteen effervescent stories, Dorthe Nors plumbs the depths of the human heart, from desire to melancholy and everything in between. Just as she did in her English-language debut, Karate Chop, Nors slices straight to the core of the conflict in only a few pages. But Wild Swims expands the borders of her gaze, following people as they travel through Copenhagen, London, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. Here are portraits of men and women full of restless longing, people who are often seeking a home but rarely finding it. A lie told during a fraught ferry ride on the North Sea becomes a wound that festers between school friends. A writer at a remote cabin befriends the mother of an ex-lover. Two friends knock doors to solicit fraudulent donations for the cancer society. A woman taken with the idea of wild swims ventures as far as the local swimming pool."--Amazon.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member boredgames
darkly deeply sad and weird vignettes. i love her mordant view of the world
LibraryThing member yarb
More vignettes along the lines of those collected in “Karate Chop”. These are the kind of story that reads great in the New Yorker or similar, but just feels too slight collected like this. My fave was probably the title story, in which a woman goes for a swim.
LibraryThing member AnnieMod
Fitting 14 stories in about 23K words (in the English translation anyway; the Danish original may have been a few thousand words shorter or longer) does not allow much space for each story (and none of them is significantly longer than the rest). I like stories but I often find the very short ones
Dorthe Nors (assisted in the English version by her translator Misha Hoekstra) knows how to make the best use of the limited space here. We have a man who finally decides to stand for himself and ends up stuck outside in the middle of winter; we have people who can keep a grudge; we have a man who believes someone to spend some time after his wife's death who gets a not so nice surprise; we have a man dying from cancer and a woman who helps him - or so it seems anyway. They are all real people - flawed, sometimes borderline bad (and maybe not so borderline) - but people. None of the stories really tell a surprising story (and none of them rely on surprising reveals) but they all build their narratives slowly and carefully, giving you details slowly until the full picture emerges - the non linear storytelling, with elements from the past showing up when you think you already know what happens can be annoying sometimes but here, because of the length of the pieces, it actually helps the story work better and not fall flat at the end.
One thing that strikes you when reading the stories is that even in the most intimate of them, there is a distance - sometimes in space (in addition to the stories set in Denmark, there are stories set in USA, Canada, England and Norway and a few stories which spend at least some of their narrative during some type of travel), sometimes in feelings, sometimes both. Noone seems allowed to feel close to anyone else or to be able to connect properly (with one curious exception - in "Sun Dogs", a writer living in a cabin develops a sudden closeness with the mother of an ex-lover - although even in that, there is a different type of remoteness and lack of closeness). The whole collection feels like the author is trying to say "People are complicated and always there but you are always alone, even when other people are around". Setting a lot of the stories away from home for the characters adds more to that feeling of remoteness and isolation (even in the middle of Boston for one of the characters in "Between Offices"). And even when things are going well, even when there is human connection which seems to work, it does not last - the man in "Hygge" may be chased by most women in the seniors meeting and even allows himself to be caught once in awhile but that does not lead to closeness.
None of the stories really shined and yet, I just kept reading the slim collection. Some of the stories in this collections had been published in Harper's, New Yorker, Tin House, A Public Space. That did not surprise me - the collection is exactly what I expect when I read these magazines.
I still wished some of the stories to be a bit longer, a bit more developed - not because they were missing something to be complete but because of all of the unsaid. But then, that just added to the remoteness. And reading them all in order, in one sitting may not be the best way to read the collection - it works length- and time-wise but it gets a bit too gloomy by the end.
If you expect something to happen in every story, this collection may not be for you. While something does happen indeed, a lot of the "something" is mundane and almost banal. But so is life, isn't it?
It was my first book by Nors and I doubt it will be the last.
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to be unsatisfying - unless they rely on surprises in the last paragraphs, the length rarely allows for much depth. And yet, there are some types, usually the ones where a single moment in time or an emotion is highlighted, where the shortness works to the benefit of the story. Dorthe Nors (assisted in the English version by her translator Misha Hoekstra) knows how to make the best use of the limited space here. We have a man who finally decides to stand for himself and ends up stuck outside in the middle of winter; we have people who can keep a grudge; we have a man who believes someone to spend some time after his wife's death who gets a not so nice surprise; we have a man dying from cancer and a woman who helps him - or so it seems anyway. They are all real people - flawed, sometimes borderline bad (and maybe not so borderline) - but people. None of the stories really tell a surprising story (and none of them rely on surprising reveals) but they all build their narratives slowly and carefully, giving you details slowly until the full picture emerges - the non linear storytelling, with elements from the past showing up when you think you already know what happens can be annoying sometimes but here, because of the length of the pieces, it actually helps the story work better and not fall flat at the end.
One thing that strikes you when reading the stories is that even in the most intimate of them, there is a distance - sometimes in space (in addition to the stories set in Denmark, there are stories set in USA, Canada, England and Norway and a few stories which spend at least some of their narrative during some type of travel), sometimes in feelings, sometimes both. Noone seems allowed to feel close to anyone else or to be able to connect properly (with one curious exception - in "Sun Dogs", a writer living in a cabin develops a sudden closeness with the mother of an ex-lover - although even in that, there is a different type of remoteness and lack of closeness). The whole collection feels like the author is trying to say "People are complicated and always there but you are always alone, even when other people are around". Setting a lot of the stories away from home for the characters adds more to that feeling of remoteness and isolation (even in the middle of Boston for one of the characters in "Between Offices"). And even when things are going well, even when there is human connection which seems to work, it does not last - the man in "Hygge" may be chased by most women in the seniors meeting and even allows himself to be caught once in awhile but that does not lead to closeness.
None of the stories really shined and yet, I just kept reading the slim collection. Some of the stories in this collections had been published in Harper's, New Yorker, Tin House, A Public Space. That did not surprise me - the collection is exactly what I expect when I read these magazines.
I still wished some of the stories to be a bit longer, a bit more developed - not because they were missing something to be complete but because of all of the unsaid. But then, that just added to the remoteness. And reading them all in order, in one sitting may not be the best way to read the collection - it works length- and time-wise but it gets a bit too gloomy by the end.
If you expect something to happen in every story, this collection may not be for you. While something does happen indeed, a lot of the "something" is mundane and almost banal. But so is life, isn't it?
It was my first book by Nors and I doubt it will be the last.
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LibraryThing member thorold
A collection of short, enigmatic stories about people who are not quite at home in the world, in which the real thing that's going on often seems to be somewhere in the background, just hinted at in a passing phrase that you might almost miss the first time you read it.
The man in the opening story
The man in the opening story
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"In a deer stand" is stuck in a forest, injured and waiting for rescuers who might never arrive, but his real concern is with someone called Lisette who seems to have become the third person in his marriage; in the title story "Wild swims" a woman imagines swimming illegally in the moat of a fortress, but finds the necessary contact with other people involved in the experience of using a municipal swimming pool every bit as wild and dangerous. And so on in the other twelve stories squashed into this 120-page Pushkin Press book: Nors keeps on turning everyday reality into something strange and challenging. Show Less
LibraryThing member greeniezona
I picked this book up for Women in Translation Month not knowing much about it. It is a collection of short stories (most 3-5 pages long), with no connections other than thematically, taking place all over the world. The theme seems to be a kind of longing. Whether it is for belonging or
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understanding or some sort of completion. All the POV characters, men and women, seem to have a sort of itch that things are not quite as they wish them to be. Some escape their irritation, some do not. Some are not particularly likable, some are instantly familiar. A charming and quick read. Show Less
Language
Original language
English