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Summary
Summary
A smart, witty novel of driving lessons and vertigo, short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize
Sonja is ready to get on with her life. She's over forty now, and the Swedish crime novels she translates are losing their fascination. She sees a masseuse, tries to reconnect with her sister, and is finally learning to drive. But under the overbearing gaze of her driving instructor, Sonja is unable to shift gears for herself. And her vertigo, which she has always carefully hidden, has begun to manifest at the worst possible moments.
Sonja hoped her move to Copenhagen years ago would have left rural Jutland in the rearview mirror. Yet she keeps remembering the dramatic landscapes of her childhood--the endless sky, the whooper swans, the rye fields--and longs to go back. But how can she return to a place that she no longer recognizes? And how can she escape the alienating streets of Copenhagen?
In Mirror, Shoulder, Signal , Dorthe Nors brings her distinctive blend of style, humor, and insight to a poignant journey of one woman in search of herself when there's no one to ask for directions.
Author Notes
Dorthe Nors is the author of two novellas, So Much for That Winter ; a story collection, Karate Chop , winner of the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize; and four novels. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker , Harper's Magazine , A Public Space , Tin House ,and elsewhere . She lives in Denmark.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The astute and contemplative latest from Nors (So Much for That Winter) follows 40-something Sonja, a transplant to Copenhagen from rural Jutland, as she belatedly comes to terms with adulthood. It's been years since she spoke to her simpler, better-adjusted sister, Kate, and she barely makes a living translating popular Swedish crime novels. While her massage therapist Ellen considers her an "emotional tight-ass," Sonja thinks of herself as a "parasite on the colossal cadaver of Western culture." Sonja, fighting nostalgia for her childhood in the rye fields, needs a change in her life, but she can't recapture her youth without finding a way to reach out to the estranged Kate, and she can't drive home from Copenhagen without a driver's license. She undertakes driving lessons, but problems arise when they trigger her latent vertigo. Out of this subtle emotional drama, Nors brings to life Sonja's everyday trials and lacerating self-doubt, with vivid characters like the quietly judgmental Ellen; Sonja's larger-than-life driving instructor, Jytte; and the distant Kate, to whom Sonja tepidly begins to write postcards. Not a lot happens this thoughtful novel, but not a lot has to. Nors conjures a gently fraught reality in prose that evokes a life paused halfway between nostalgia for the past and hope for the future. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The Danish author vividly captures the life and loves of a nonconformist translator of crime fiction "I write minimalism that is under attack from within," the Danish author Dorthe Nors has said of her bracingly unclassifiable fiction. Nors was first published in English in 2015, with twin works appearing in one reversible volume. Karate Chop comprised 15 razor-sharp, rueful mini-stories, while Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, in which the eponymous heroine is forced to devise her "soundless music" in Copenhagen's public library, took the form of single-sentence social media status updates. The punchy statements such as "Minna is on Facebook" and "Minna isn't a day over 40" were punctuated by more recognisably literary musings: "A woman should have room for a flute, a triangle, and a guitar." Nors published four full-length novels in Danish before Karate Chop and Minna. In Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, the first of these to appear in English, admirers of Minna will find welcome similarities in the main character: fiercely nonconformist Sonja is a 40-something Swedish-to-Danish translator of violent Stieg Larsson -style crime fiction, belatedly learning to drive while suffering from real and metaphorical vertigo. Originally from remote west Jutland, she has never got used to big city life in Copenhagen. (Or "gotten" -- one of the main intrusions on the reading experience is Misha Hoekstra's aggressively American-English translation, which has the effect of rendering a cosmopolitan European city into something akin to a US shopping mall.) Newly single after being dumped by fellow translator Paul, Sonja frets in a loquacious expansion of Minna 's truncated prose. "I can't shift for myself," she despairs, her wrestling with the car gears being a glaringly obvious metaphor for her life. If the history of its publication were undocumented, it would be tempting to view Mirror as an amplification of Minna : both employ a third-person-as-first-person observational narrator. Certainly the formal recklessness of Nors's writing is most apparently effective in the novella -- essentially plotless, it is enriched by its own contrivance. With Mirror, Sonja has the task of sustaining the reader's engagement through complete paragraphs, with the mostly successful assistance of a variety of supporting actors. These include insistently spiritual massage therapist Ellen, and Sonja's two driving instructors: abrasive Jytte, and married Folke, with whom Sonja may or not be flirting -- either way, she plays them off against each other as the book progresses. In the background lurk her faraway parents and semi-estranged, married-with-kids older sister, Kate, who uses any pretext, however elaborate, to avoid emotional intimacy. "I'm a parasite on the colossal cadaver of western culture" is a typical mournful but self-deprecating Sonjaism. Her commentary accompanies some excellent situational tragicomedy, such as the scene in which, panic-stricken, she drops out of an all-women "meditative hiking" trek to scoff cake in the park cafe. Nors is at her most trenchant and empathic when her protagonist, riddled with superstition and uncertainty, is inwardly soliloquising, whether under the soothing hands of Ellen, in rambling unsent letters to Kate, or the constant harking back to the perceived serenity of a childhood surrounded by wheatfields and whooper swans. Sonja, like Minna, is fatalistic - where Minna gloomily watched her boyfriend's new relationship play out on Facebook, Sonja attributes a misremembered incident with a fortune teller to her recent break up: 'The fortune teller had certainly been right that she'd be unhappy in love. First she met Paul. Then she fell in love. Then he chose a twenty-something girl... and the rest of the fortune she repressed'. This 200-page lamentation on contemporary loneliness would quickly grate if it were not for the benevolent ingenuity of Nors's writing. When Sonja's narrative breaks free of the corner she has boxed herself into, the prose swoops and soars like her yearned-for whooper swans. It's at these moments that Nors's reinvention of experimental fiction is so marvellous: the remainder of her backlist should not disappoint. - Catherine Taylor.
Kirkus Review
In this tautly observed novel, Nors reveals a middle-age woman on the verge of disappearance and discovery.Danish writer Nors is a miniaturist; her book So Much for That Winter (2016) gathers two novellas that read like collections of epigrams, while her story collection Karate Chop (2014) brings together 15 microfictions, each imbued with an uneasy sense of loss. In this, the first of her four novels to be translated into English, she follows up on and enlarges these concerns. The story of Sonja, 40-something, a translator of Swedish crime fiction, the book unfolds in and around Copenhagen, but its true territory is the inner life. Sonja is stuck: bored of translation work, envious (but not really) of her sister who appears to have it all. She is learning to drivethe title is a reference to her instructor's admonition about changing lanes in trafficand she also suffers from positional vertigo, an inherited condition in which she can fall prey to dizziness simply by the wrong movement of her head. In part, all this is metaphor, a way to frame Sonja's displacement. She is anonymous, much like the women Nors describes in her essay "On the Invisibility of Middle-Aged Women" (2016). At the same time, Nors is after something bigger than mere symbol; she is trying to excavate the pattern of a life. "But it doesn't matter," Sonja says late in the novel. "I manage, of course." The line, in many ways, is key to the novel, which makes vivid drama out of the most mundane events. Not much happens heresome awkward interactions with her driving teachers, a couple of massages, some letters and phone calls with her familybut not much has to, for the drama Nors excavates is the most human one. What does it mean to keep on living? What does it mean to make a place for oneself, no matter how small or conditional? "A person who has her hand on the back of your heart," Sonja reminds us, "shouldn't be unsure."Nors is an exquisitely precise writer, and in rendering her heroine's small disruptions and, yes, victories, she is writing for, and of, every one of us. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
All Sonja wants is to learn how to drive. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, things aren't going well. Her first instructor terrifies her, her second instructor lusts after her, and Sonja's driving skills remain shaky at best. And the rest of her life isn't going so well, either. Past 40, unmarried, and bored with her job as a translator, Sonja is beginning to fear that the things she hoped for will never come to pass. Her relationship with her sister is as strained as ever, she is often lonely, and a move from rural Denmark to Copenhagen only relocated her existing problems to a new address. Nors' slim novel, a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, allows the reader into Sonja's mind as she struggles to connect with the world around her. Though introspective, Sonja's observations about her own life are often painfully incorrect, but Nors stands back and allows Sonja to spin her wheels. Ultimately, it is her uncertainty that makes Sonja such an endearing character and gives the novel its quiet insights.--Winterroth, Amanda Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Americans who regard with bafflement what's often called "Trump country" (especially the women therein) will find illumination in "Mirror, Shoulder, Signal." Nors's exquisite novel takes up a fistful of modern conundrums, among them the urban-rural divide, the commodification of intimacy in late capitalism and what Nors calls, in a shrewd essay published last year on LitHub, "The Invisibility of Middle-Aged Women." Sonja is a childless 40-something translator of misogynistic thrillers devoured by her Danish countrymen. She longs for her home in rural Jutland, a rustic landscape of sold-off farms, aggressive drivers, rye fields and what's left of Denmark's natural sublime. Cosmopolitan Copenhagen once offered Sonja cultural refuge, but now "the parties have turned into receptions." Fleeing a meditation retreat in a deer park hosted by her New Age masseuse, Sonja realizes that paid touch and urban simulacra of wilderness have worn thin. As with the best books, plot summary fails to bottle the lightning of "Mirror, Shoulder, Signal." Despite chronic vertigo inherited from her mother, Sonja wants to learn to drive, and most of the external friction of this novel stems from her decision to register a formal complaint about her ineffectual driving-school instructor. The mind is Nors's landscape, and yearning her true subject. Sonja's is an objectless yearning, deeper than nostalgia. Page after addictive page, Nors pushes Sonja beyond her class betrayal and survivor's guilt, beyond anger at her mother for encouraging her independence, into and, miraculously, out of a profound dislocation of the soul embodied by her vertigo, which bursts forth in a gorgeous, breathless finale. Nors, author of "So Much for That Winter" and "Karate Chop," lingers on Sonya's small acts of heroism: complimenting an ugly baby while its mother shops for plus-sized clothes, composing an honest letter to her housewife sister, offering a tourist directions. Nors gives the invisible woman the dignity of her artful gaze; as Sonja thinks on the masseuse's table, "It's wonderful being delved into." This triumphant novel sounds the depths of women's unseen strength in a register that reconciles enlightened feminism with working-class rage.