So Much for That Winter: Novellas
Staff Reviews
Dorthe Nors new book So Much for That Winter is comprised of two spare novellas set in contemporary Denmark. The first, “Minna Needs Rehearsal Space,” is a story of heartbreak and recovery told in short, declarative sentences: “Minna has gotten Lars to elaborate on his text. / Lars wrote, But I’m really not in love with you. / Lars has always understood how to cut to the chase. / Minna can’t wring anything more out of him.” The second novella, “Days,” is a woman’s diary, a series of lists of what the unnamed narrator does and thinks as she moves through her life and her relationships. Their forms may be experimental, but the short tales in So Much for That Winter punch well above their weight and land with as much impact as any 1000-page tome.
Inventive and emotionally charged, the two novellas in So Much for That Winter bridge the gap between melancholy and humor. Told in a series of lists and headlines, these stories of the aftermath of two relationships are witty examinations of love and heartbreak in an age of technological detachment and shortened attention spans. Nors' relentlessly paced vision of modern life should not be missed.
Description
Dorthe Nors follows up her acclaimed story collection Karate Chop with a pair of novellas that playfully chart the aftermath of two very twenty-first-century romances. In "Days," a woman in her late thirties records her life in a series of lists, giving shape to the tumult of her days--one moment she is eating an apple, the next she is on the floor, howling like a dog. As the details accumulate, we experience with her the full range of emotions: anger, loneliness, regret, pain, and also joy, as the lists become a way to understand, connect to, and rebuild her life.
In "Minna Needs Rehearsal Space," a novella told in headlines, an avant-garde musician is dumped via text message. Fleeing the indignity of the breakup and friends who flaunt their achievements in life, career, and family, Minna unfriends people on Facebook, listens to Bach, and reads Ingmar Bergman, then decamps to an island near Sweden, "well suited to mental catharsis." A cheeky nod to the listicles and bulletins we scroll through on a daily basis, So Much for That Winter explores how we shape and understand experience, and the disconnection and dislocation that define our twenty-first-century lives, with Nors's unique wit and humor.
Praise for So Much for That Winter: Novellas
A PUBLIC SPACE BOOK
FORMALLY INVENTIVE AND EMOTIONALLY CHARGED NOVELLAS BY “A MAJOR NEW VOICE IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE” (BOOK TRUST)
“How often can we honestly say that a book is unlike anything else? Yet here it is, unique in form and effect.”—The Guardian
“[So Much for That Winter is] one of the speediest and most intriguing of this year’s summer books. . . . The rhythm of Nors’ work, shaped from headlines, fragments and status updates, is eerily familiar. Her innovative novellas hold a mirror to our disjointed times.”—BBC
“Nors’ writing is by turns witty, gut wrenching, stark and lyrical. Her characters seesaw between longing for human connection and the space in which to lick their wounds. That she achieves all this while experimenting with form is something of an impossible feat. . . . Nors has created an exciting and artful literary diptych.” —Los Angeles Times
“So Much for That Winter is not only about our hyperconnected yet atomized times but ingeniously of them as well. The novellas are daring formal experiments that simultaneously evoke and critique the feeling of online life.”—Slate
"Nors' use of unconventional storytelling forms beautifully illustrates how modern life has both veered from tradition and become constrained by its conventions. . . . With her keen eye fixed on the power of small, everyday moments, So Much for that Winter is a wonderful reminder, both in form and function, of the unexpected joys present in each day."—Cedar Rapids Gazette
“Though they make up the traffic of our online lives, lists and headlines have never felt so alive, so uncomfortable, so raw as they do when Nors writes them.”—Seattle Weekly
“[Dorthe Nors] experiments with form as a means to explore the rich inner lives of her characters. There’s great humor and unflinching pathos in her examination of modern life in all of its absurdity and loneliness.” —BOMB Magazine
“Dorthe Nors’s unique narrative style underlines both the loneliness of her characters and the jarring discontinuity of life in a postmodern world.”—World Literature Today
“Nors is a wholly unique voice in contemporary literature: a maximalist working within minimalist forms, hammering her prose into those shapes that will better amplify its power.”—The Rumpus
"[So Much For That Winter presents] an edgy evocation of contemporary life. Nors is a creator of small spaces; her fiction is relentless, edgy, brief."—Kirkus Reviews
“Minna Needs Rehearsal Space shows Nors’s economy and perceptiveness. . . . The reader is treated to a cathartic and suspenseful climax."—Publishers Weekly
“If forevermore we are obliged to think in headlines and status updates, let us sound like Dorthe Nors.” —Bookswept
"Nors addresses crucial questions of contemporary existence with great humor and humanity. . . . Nors' gaze is intimate and unflinching as she examines the isolation that arises from a plugged-in world."— Sycamore Review
“In [So Much for That Winter] there is inventiveness and motion, angst and loss, puzzles and minor epiphanies. . . . Nors packs much into her telegraphic works. . . . [The novellas] contain despair, grief, family conflicts, aesthetic pursuits, and the mundane; the two narrators are present, flesh, bone, heart, and spirit.”—Numero Cinq
“Until 2016, I never realized that what was missing from my life was a pair of formally experimental novellas, So Much for That Winter, translated from Danish, about contemporary loneliness and isolation. Dorthe Nors' formal innovation is playful but organic and necessary, entwined with character and subject. The writing is emotionally direct, unsentimental, and surprisingly moving. Genuine newness is always an achievement.”—Chris Bachelder, Esquire Best Books of 2016
“A pair of novellas that are fantastically new in form yet have heart, slyness and soul. . . . Together, these delicate, delightful, moving novellas are rooted in soul-depths rarely plumbed with such glancing light.”—Jane Alison, author of Nine Island
“Dorthe Nors’s novella ‘Minna Needs Rehearsal Space,’ in her book So Much for That Winter, set off fireworks in my brain: it’s a story told in one- or two-sentence headlines. I loved the way that the mostly one-line paragraphs marched down the page in prickly self-containment, with a lot of white space that demands a certain kind of attention from the reader.”—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“Simply gorgeous.”—Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing With Feathers
“So Much for That Winter is uniquely composed, yet eminently readable. Nors's experimental style permits a sidelong glance, not only into perhaps the scaffolding upon which stories are built, but also the spaces between things—much as a painting or song reveals itself in the interims between brushstrokes or notes.”
—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s City of Books, Portland, OR
