It seems to me Ms Nors very much changed her fiction style to deliver this impressionistic piece of travel writing. That's not to pretend there is an awful lot of travel here, however – despite the mentions of ferries here and there, and the use of her car, much of this seems taken from a place of stillness, a poised look up and around and back into memory. The most movement in any one of the small essay/chapters is when she and a friend drive around to check out some church frescoes. She does end up in Amsterdam, but any dynamism is her flashing to and fro from there to recollections of another place.

All the places are the low-lying, storm-tossed western coasts of Denmark, down to the Wadden Sea off the Netherlands. We see the way the sand can encroach, to the extent lighthouses need to be moved now and again. These are the beaches the Vikings would have seen over their shoulder if set on invading the UK. It's a place of isolation, to the extent the nearest neighbours when she was growing up there were almost the people in the chemical plant, carefully depositing their poisons into the environment and fish, out of sight of any populations large enough to really complain.

All told the writing makes the author sound suitably engaging and knowledgeable about all the sites, however much you might be frustrated by all her talk of a line, and then just hitting spots on it and not travelling along it from either end to the other. I can see her style being a little divisive. Certainly, however, the places seem ones you envy her seeing, despite the wind, the moving dunes, the threat of lethal storms, of being cut off by flooded causeways and cancelled ferries. It would probably be a rare book to tackle this corner of Europe, and rarer still to cover it more interestingly.

From the blurb: [Nors] chronicles a year spent travelling up and down the coast, tracing the history and geography of the places she visits and untangling her relationship with the landscape she calls home.

This was an anticipated read for me and wow. I don’t read travel books and yet this one called to me. I’d heard that Nors’ fictional writing was a thing of beauty and wanted to see how it would translate in non-fiction. Nors’ use of language to describe the landscapes and people is lyrical. It may sound silly, but there is so much more to Denmark and that region than Copenhagen. It was so interesting to read about how Denmark relates to its neighbours and the changing borders. The land as a persona and to be engaged with as much as the people encountered made me want to pack a bag and go exploring.

“I know other people’s stories are out there in their thousands, but this is my encounter wit the place 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 the map and finds a pencil. The land, now, is engulfed in fog.”

Pub Date: 6 October 2022
Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for letting me read this exploratory ARC.

🌊 Danish coast
🌊 nature memoir
🌊 tradition, anecdotes, reflections

A Line in the World is a book to be savoured slowly. With nuanced strokes and riveting details, these 14 essays blend nature writing with personal reflections and anecdotes about communities along the Danish coastline.

Nors opens the book with the ‘schism in which identity is formed’. Identity is shaped by plurality and contradictions, mixing individual experiences with heritage and landscape. The sea connects and deters, simultaneously a highway to new lands and a watery grave. It feeds wanderlust, but also instils fear and suspicion towards the outside world. The land retains human memories, archiving lived experiences through paths, shipwrecks, frescoed churches, and mythical ruins. I enjoyed the story of the wandering Borglum Abbey, which disappears from time to time on moonlit nights. Similarly eerie are the rumours about Marmø, where lonely people vanish into thin air.

Women’s place in traditional communities is another recurring theme. I learned about the Danish custom of burning witch dolls on summer solstice. It’s not for a foreigner like me to judge, but it made me reflect on the misogynist roots of festivals I grew up with and still love deeply - Qixi, for example. Nors paints vivid portraits of strong women in coastal communities, from weather-hardened grandmothers on ‘housewife beaches’ to womenfolk in Sønderho who used to run the town when the men were at sea. She also shares personal stories about how her mother defied her parents to become an artist, and how Nors still had trouble fitting into local communities as an independent, unmarried woman.

Alongside tradition, Nors also discusses change and renewal. Two stories are my favourite. One is about the Cheminova chemical factory, whose unchecked pollution pushed Denmark’s first environmentalist, Aage Hansen, to take action. The other is about population shifts. While many towns become depopulated as young people move to cities, surfers in the Cold Hawaii camp revived a dying fishing village called Klitmoller despite the initial suspicion of the locals.

Thank you Pushkin Press for this ARC.

This was an interesting read. I enjoyed reading it. I finished this short story in one sitting. This book was full of culture and it was fun travelling with the author down from the tip of Denmark. I loved how each chapter started with a wonderful pen drawing or the place the author was to talk about. It was so beautifully wrote and so descriptive. It was almost poetic in places. It was definitely an interesting and enjoyable journey. I actually rated it 3.5 stars rounded up as it was better than a average 3 star rating but fell a little short of the 4th star. Its a brilliant book that you should read a sample of to see if it your cup of tea it could be your 5 star read. I recommend this book if you love travelling the world from the comfort of your own home. 

So much praise goes out to the author and publishing team for bringing us this lovely travel story.

The above review has already been placed on goodreads, waterstones, Google books, Barnes&noble, kobo, amazon UK where found and my blog today https://ladyreading365.wixsite.com/website/post/a-line-in-the-world-by-dorthe-nors-signe-parkins-pushkin-press-3-5-stars either under my name or ladyreading365

When I was small my grandma used to tell me 'we are Danes.'

I was brought up on the opposite side of that wild expanse, the west side of the North Sea in eastern England. A thousand years ago much of the language, even culture in my part of the world was Danish, Viking, and it was called the Danelaw.

And there are still archaic words of old Norse in use today in our rapidly disappearing dialect. So maybe we are, in some ways, still Danes.

Perhaps that's why, when I began to read this ARC, I immediately felt at home. Although Jutland's west coast from Skagen to the German border is north and west facing, opposite to our own, the author's loose, often short sentenced yet lucid and impressionistic streams of consciousness took me not only across the divide of the North Sea, but also into the past, my own childhood often spent at the windswept seaside and walking wrapped up in barren marshland where the sky towers above you.

In the flat lands of eastern England there is indeed a psychology at play, much like the writer explains; the quietude does not disguise or distract you from the demons inside like a city does. Here you are more with yourself, and it can be difficult, even depressing, particularly in the winter.

She says 'Our brown calves are wet with cuckoo spit', fairly typical of her language which is immediate and sensory, creating a timelessness where past and present merge together, much like the schism of land and sea. She says, throughout the book, that we are defined by schism and I think I know what she means. A country is defined by its border; our selves from one another. A home has its boundary, which is both porous and selective.

In this book the elements are like beings, sometimes friends, but always needing to be respected; the waves like mythological Valkyries: the Norse gods, like Odin, remain in the collective memory of Scandinavians - and isn't Odin rather 'Christ-like', hanging from that ash tree, the Yggdrasil, even if he put himself up there? Yes, our 'civilisation is a snapshot'; we try to understand, perhaps make a mark and then we are gone.

Like my own coastline, Jutland is bedecked with massive wind turbine farms, which to my eye, have become a blot on the seascape as well as the land. Clean energy is to be encouraged, naturally, but these structures which she describes as white trees with circular branches, only have a limited lifespan. Once defunct they will cause a massive landfill problem - and the wind doesn't always blow either.

But I particularly like the way she talks of the past in the present tense in many places, so fitting for this ever changing, yet eternal landscape, which has had so many shipwrecks (the Iron Coast) and natural disasters through storms.

I loved her tour of the churches too with the artist, the maker of sketches for this book. My own part of the world is noted for its churches too, but in a different way. And I was not aware that the Reformation in Denmark was slower to whitewash church frescoes than in England and Holland, all very fascinating.

I like the way she describes paths in the landscape as being like memories, connections in the brain, synapses perhaps, testimony to human interaction with the environment and shaping it organically.

Her descriptions of the Wadden Sea, the island life, the bird life, are all beautiful too. I very much relate to the area here being a haven for wading birds, pretty much like my own part of the world.

But ultimately it is Skagen, the very northern tip of Denmark where North Sea meets Baltic, the spiritual pinnacle of the Danish and Scandinavian experience. The schism of seas, between land and sea, our selves from one another: life and death.

Like many, I have only visited Copenhagen when in Denmark, but this great city is in no way representative of Denmark any more than London is of England.

One day, perhaps sooner than I envisage, I wish to visit Denmark again, Jutland in particular, and take that trip from Skagen to Esbjerg and beyond towards the Frisian islands. I think I owe it to myself. Thank you Dorthe Nors for enlightening me - I have never felt more like a Dane.

Thank you for the advanced copy, beautiful drawings at the start of the chapters.
Well written and put together, interesting read.

Fairly interesting account of observations, feelings and emotions as she travels the coast line. Quaint pencil drawings at the start of each chapter.