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A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast
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About This Book
A celebrated Danish writer explores the unsung histories and geographies of her beloved slice of the world. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It's a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct. Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction book chronicles a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast—from Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. In fourteen expansive essays, Nors traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors' ties to the region as well as her decision to move there from Copenhagen. She writes about the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer's Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages that surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii starting in the 1970s. She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, thirteenth-century church frescoes to her mother's unrealized dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks, and other instances of nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it. Through a deep, personal engagement with this singular landscape, A Line in the World accesses the universal. Its ultimate subjects are civilization, belonging, and change: changes within one person's life, changes occurring in various communities today, and change as the only constant of life on Earth.
Reviews
"graceful, lyrical ..."
"In some of the book's most dramatic passages, Nors offers colorful descriptions of the raging North Sea gales, whose hurricane-force winds and murderous storm surges periodically batter this coastline ..."
"It struck me as a rare thing to read a work of travel writing that was this beautiful yet did not provoke in me any desire to actually visit the place."
"linear in the way memory is linear: it is, until you realize it's not ..."
"Nors's portrait of her connection to a landscape both 'harsh and mild' enchants."
"Instead, its 14 short chapters see Nors tussle with a place brimming with memories and strangeness, where storms surge and lighthouses blink."
"In her attempt to understand the shapeshifting Danish peninsula, combing over the history, traditions and myths of the region, she is making sense of this world and her place within it ..."
"People aren't wholly incidental to the narrative."
"Who else could have done justice to this wild landscape, the stubborn psyche of its inhabitants, its brutal myths and its toxic industry?"
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