Karate Chop – Dorthe Nors

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Danish literature, Dorthe Nors, Graywolf Press, literature, review, short story review

Fifteen stories in eighty-eight pages and it’s called Karate Chop? Pictures spring to mind of sharp-edged minimalism, the jolt of the unexpected. I had high hopes for this collection, the first English publication of Danish author Dorthe Nors (translated by Martin Aitken for Graywolf Press). It garnered widespread critical acclaim and I, expecting something quite unique, was unprepared for what I got: all too often rote slice-of-life stories.

I’ve never cared for slice-of-life, mainly because it’s so hard to do well. Especially in shortened form, it makes too often for quotidian extracts from life packed together without breathing room. A writer has to be either an excellent stylist (Mavis Gallant, Edna O’Brien) or supremely perceptive (Anton Chekhov, god of the life unlived) for it to work. Nors has these qualities but not in a reliable amount. What she excels at is atmosphere and her stories only pop when she allows slice-of-life to have a freak accident. In that way, she reminded me of Joyce Carol Oates, only with greater discipline (well, it’s hard to have less) and an air of mystery. Nors doesn’t believe in spelling things out for the audience. It’s unfortunate then, that so much left unsaid feels so ordinary.

The best stories in Karate Chop have a menacing and autumnal air of decay. With the exceptions of ‘The Buddhist’ and the title story, very little tends to happen. Nors prefers to suggest and when she uses that technique and goes beyond slice-of-life into a different type of gloom, the result is delicately unnerving, as in the conclusion of ‘Mutual Destruction’:

A man and his dog in the twilight, but something more. He had to take it in. Take a good look, because that’s how it was: there was something inside Morten that shunned the light. Something Tina said was a kind of complex. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t know what to say about it, other than that it smelled like offal, and that the smell was spreading.

This ominous trait is so good that reviewers tend to emphasise it, but in truth fewer than half of the stories hit that mark. The rest, though moody, do not carve out a distinct identity for themselves. It doesn’t help that, without the atmospheric displays, Nors’ writing is thoroughly nondescript. I particularly remembered the front door when I turned to go back inside. The light from the lamp shining on the wall cladding and door handle. That sort of thing. Apart from the Danish setting and stylistic brevity, there is very little here to differentiate Karate Chop‘s divorces and family traumas from the rest of the pack.

Because of the brevity, Nors has been compared to Lydia Davis, but to qualify she’d have to break her stories down even further. ‘Nat Newsom’ fills four pages, but the wham moment, when Nat allows himself to be conned by an especially inexpert hustler, requires only one to set up and execute. Several of the less interesting stories could have hit a nerve with this treatment. ‘Hair Salon’ splits its attention between an old lady in a laundromat and the dog she dopes up so she can keep it in her apartment. The old woman pretends a solidarity with the narrator to salve her own isolation in the modern world but the detail about the dog is a far more powerful way of transmitting that.

The strongest stories in Karate Chop actually fulfill the promise of its title. The twisted premise of ‘The Buddhist’ is treated with a sense of humour that in no way impinges on its horrifying punchline. ‘The Heron’ is narrated by a morose and death-haunted man, musing on the sickly herons and occasional dismembered bodies you can find in the park (it was featured in the New Yorker and fully deserved it). ‘Female Killers’ also features a morbid man at its center, obsessed with women who kill and the survival of the fittest. ‘Karate Chop’ succeeds with a familiar tale, as an abused woman questions her relationship choices with an especially opaque and subtly chilling conclusion. These and ‘Mutual Destruction’ show what she’s capable of. Memorable and finely tuned sketches of life on the regular side of macabre. And all her talent is given full rein in the final and best story, ‘The Wadden Sea’.

It is hard to convey the enchanting quality of ‘The Wadden Sea’. The story is simple and told through the eyes of a child. A mother suffering “fear of life” moves to Sønderho, using the Wadden Sea mudflats for “healing power.” It is a fully formed piece of work, conveying a family’s tension, the struggles of a depressed mind, the layers of a local community and an impeccable sense of place, all in six pages. There were many artists and musicians living in that little community. There were rich people too, though I didn’t know any of them, and then there were the locals and the town alcoholics. Like rooks, they tended to attract each other so that certain parts of the town were clusters of people with indistinct pronunciations and chinking shopping bags. Her tone is perfect for conveying the overcast stillness of the mudflats and my only reaction on finishing it was “damn, that was good.”

If only she could sustain such a voice… In spite of the disappointing nature of this collection, Karate Chop has some truly excellent stories that are well worth a read. I can’t recommend it overall unless you really enjoy slice-of-life. But I’m nevertheless anticipating the translations of some of her novels (she’s written five). Is she average with flashes of brilliance or is she in the process of cultivating a unique voice for herself? It could go either way but I await the answer with interest.

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Before I Burn – Gaute Heivoll

Tags

crime fiction, Gaute Heivoll, Graywolf Press, literature, MS originals, Norwegian literature, review, Scandinavian crime

(Enjoy one of the five reviews I originally wrote for Media Snobs)

Genre: Crime
Author: Gaute Heivoll
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Type: Novel
Year Published: 2014

Bottom Line: 3.5 / 5 – Good

Wave after wave of Scandinavian crime fiction has descended upon America and it still shows no sign of stopping. It’s an impressively lucrative business for a cultural landscape known to shy away from works in translation. As of 2012, The Economist noted that “only 3% of the books published annually in America and Britain are translated from another language; fiction’s slice is less than 1%”. What The Economist didn’t say is that considering the sheer size of the American publishing industry, that is still a heck of a lot of material. There’s obviously plenty of room for improvement but at least those crime writers can’t complain…

Gaute Heivoll’s Before I Burn is one of the most recent works in the field, a standalone novel based on Norway’s most dramatic arsonry case and centered around a man named Gaute Heivoll who, an infant at the time, narrates the story in the present day. So it reads like true crime but is in fact a novel; it looks like metafictional trickery but is in fact solidly down-to-earth. Gaute pieces together what happened, making liberal use of his empathetic imagination to enter the minds of the victims as, one by one, buildings are set ablaze.

Before I Burn hit the scene in 2010 and has been making the rounds at a fast pace. As a bestseller, it’s been published in twenty countries. Don Bartlett did the English translation in 2013 and now it’s made it to the American market through independent publisher Graywolf Press. Bartlett is a prolific freelance translator of Norwegian novels, and though he doesn’t make you forget that you’re reading a translation, his work is thoroughly professional and he captures the required tone with ease.

For the reader to most enjoy Before I Burn, it is important to understand what it’s not. It is not a thriller or a whodunnit. The identity of the pyromaniac is given almost right away. It’s not even a whydunnit. It is a character study of a small stoic town in the 70s, where everyone knows everyone else. Heivoll gives the crime novel back to the victims, putting the focus not on the criminal or the investigators but on the ordinary and the faceless: the well-trained cantor who finds himself guarding his home with a rifle; the old couple who lose everything up to their dentures in the fire; the neighbours who carry the burden of disbelief and dread as the number of conflagrations increase. It is as anti-Hollywood as it gets.

One of the novel’s primary attractions is its crossover appeal from crime fiction to literature. It shares the clipped precision and unabated gloom of Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers, (which I admit is the only other book of this type I’ve read), yet sports a more elegant writing style, with less obvious exposition. Perhaps it tries a little too hard to elevate itself to a more “serious” level, featuring some tired examples of portentous phrasing and an incident with an ash-collecting mental patient that is too thematically pat to excuse. That said, Heivoll’s tone is hushed and respectful, forming a perfect complement to both sides of the narrative and bringing out the most hair-raising details of the arson case.

 It was then that the fire engine returned. … Out jumped a young man, though more a boy. They recognised him at once: it was the son of the fire chief, Ingemann at Skinnsnes. Inside the cabin he had a carrier bag full of food. …
 ‘Who wants a hot dog?!’ the boy yelled.
 He had to step into the trees to find a suitable stick. Then he poked it through a sausage from the bag and lurched into the ruins, more or less where the living room had been. In his white shirt he wasn’t warmly dressed, and he held out his arms as if he were walking on glass. He walked along the foundation wall for some of the way, but then turned and came back. There were no flames left, just ash and the thin, grey smoke. He cursed aloud. He had driven all the way to Kaddeberg’s to buy sausages and now there weren’t any flames or embers to cook them over! What the hell was going on? No one spoke. He started laughing. The firemen watched him, turned away and pretended there was work to be done. Helga wrapped her jacket tighter around her.
 ‘Then we’ll have to eat them cold,’ the boy continued, clearly miffed. ‘What do you say? Cold sausages!’ He jumped down from the wall, went from one fireman to the next offering cold, slippery sausages straight from the packet.

Unquestionably, the novel is at its best in dealing with Dag, the troubled kid who turns into a pyromaniac. It doesn’t try to get into his head, defining him through the tension he creates in his parents Ingemann and Alma—their desperate concern, fear and heartbreak. His interactions with Ingemann and Alma are at the core of the novel, a motif of parental loss that plays out in other generations, in other ways.

Before I Burn juggles one very tense storyline with another less impactful one—the coming-of-age of Gaute—and this is where the novel falters. It shares almost equal time with the conflagrations and it feels like the Gaute-becomes-a-writer plot took up so many pages because it was important to Heivoll, not because it always added to the underlying story. I expected the strands to weave together by the end and transform each other’s meaning but it never really happened.

What did result was an excellent sketch of the community and its reactions, both short and long-term, to the fires of 1978. Little effort is made to distinguish the multitude of people in the small town, emphasising their bond rather than sowing confusion for the reader. Gaute’s research into the past becomes an investigation into the private life and small moments which define a person. “We chatted for ages. Not only about the fires; other stories also came up, interwoven into previous ones, and in this way the conversation extended into a picture that grew bigger and bigger, and in the end it was unstoppable”.

Before I Burn is not the sort of book you should take on vacation. It is grim and will have you calling your house at all hours to check it’s still there. Yet it’s also graceful and strangely captivating, hypnotic in its attention to detail and in its evocations of life’s great pains and small joys. That’s a tough sell for some, but if you like Nordic noir it’ll be right up your street.