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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
"one of the first books to capture the unique region in English."
"For readers whose knowledge of Denmark is confined to Copenhagen and its environs, Danish writer Dorthe Nors's A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast will come as a revelation."
"In a thorough but unsystematic fashion, the writing encompasses the nature, history and provincial customs of this harsh and highly romanticized corner of the country...as she explores the area she sensitively sifts the ambiguities of belonging in the world and the condition of loving a place she knows will never love her equally in return ..."
"graceful, lyrical ..."
"Instead, its 14 short chapters see Nors tussle with a place brimming with memories and strangeness, where storms surge and lighthouses blink."
"Nors's portrait of her connection to a landscape both 'harsh and mild' enchants."
"People aren't wholly incidental to the narrative."
"Along this mutable coast, on the border between map and myth, Nors is in her element."
"In thinking more broadly about loss and landscape, Nors focuses on the slow phasing out of this way of life and its uniform."
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