A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors review - the poetic power of place

Denmark’s west coast falls in a scimitar-like curve from the tip of Jutland to the hilt of the German border. Off its edge, a string of islands begins in Fanø and sweeps down in a descending wave to Texel, perched above the Dutch mainland. In A Line in the World, the Danish novelist Dorthe Nors’ first work of nonfiction, readers are taken on a virtuoso tour of this beguiling but tempestuous part of Europe, which is littered with shipwrecks and inhabited by hardy souls.

At the book’s start, the writer is poised eagle-eyed above a map, laid out on a desk in the seaside house she has recently bought. For the next year she travels along this spine of land, ruminating on its allure and its dangers, and dipping back into memories forged in this or that spot. Like Robert Macfarlane in The Wild Places, Nors is a consummate guide to her own country. Her writing is clear and has a magnetising immediacy, allowing her to vividly and poetically describe the hold that places can have over people.

Nors grew up inland, but the sea and its beaches, where her family spent the holidays in a bolthole beside a fjord, were an enormous influence. So much so that in middle age she felt a physical urge to abandon her life in Copenhagen and return to the wilds out west. The impulse came to her one moment, as she lay in despair on the floor of her city apartment, with drug dealers for downstairs neighbours. She realised she longed for a storm surge and the lick of salt on her skin. “I want vast expanses, wasteland, wind-blasted stone, mountainous dunes and a body language I understand,” she remembers feeling.

Although Nors is at home in nature, she is not fully accepted by her new neighbours, who view her as something of an intruder. The 52-year-old believes she is neither of the city nor of the hinterland, but rather somewhere confusingly in between. “It is in the schism that all identity is formed,” she writes of this duality, sensing there are advantages to being anchored not by one place but by many. In her telling, the author is a composite of the cities, towns and villages in which she has lived, including Sonderho on Fanø. Reflecting on her time there, she says the landscape managed to swallow her up. It still remains part of her: “The Wadden Sea is powerful, and I lived a fair stretch out there. You don’t come out the other side untouched.”

As well as writing well on geography and identity, the novelist, who was shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker Prize, has a knack for conjuring up memorable vignettes. Her noteworthy digressions include a passage on weather-beaten Danish matriarchs overseeing their grandchildren at the beach and a Viking-esque portrait of her mother when she was young: “she wore pirate-style trousers, had fiery red hair and was a warrior in her own right”. As this last sentence shows, Nors is brilliant at creating one-liners that stay with you. So too: “I grew up in a silent culture in a desolate parish full of farmers and seamstresses” and “The sea has no language, as such, but every once in a while I think it speaks”.

Towards the end of her travels, Nors mentions her love of words, tracing the etymological journey of the Danish word værft (an artificial mound). As you head south, it changes shape, with its variants leaping from wierde to terp. As the writer notes, “good words travel where they please”. This seems a fitting way to think about Nors’ own prose, which drifts easily between flashes of humour and full-blown seriousness, from comic asides during a fresco tour of the region’s churches to a damning portrait of the chemical pollution which blights the waters around her family’s holiday home.

A Line in the World, translated admirably by Caroline Waight, is at its best in its flights of fancy. These include Nors imagining what Viking treasures lie, long forgotten, under the waves, and picturing the scores of long-dead sailors and rotting ships that would be revealed on the seabed, were the waters to recede. Very occasionally, however, Nors’ images do not land fully. This is the case when the seal looking out at her from Hvide Sande transforms, with a roll, from a “sodden demon” to a “much-loved dog”.

Suitably for a book which flits between sea and land, its final image is of Nors standing on a beach at the northern end of Denmark, her feet planted in two different seas. The reader leaves her there, inspired by her wanderlust and by her encouragement to travel and to remember.