REVIEW
Wild Swims. By Dorthe Nors. London: Pushkin Press, 2020.
BY Charlotte Haley

Wild Swims
Embracing the discomfort of minimalism through Nors’ tales of longing, memory, and loneliness.
Wild Swims demands of the reader a kind of mimicry of its characters, contemplative and isolated as they are. Dorthe Nors’ sparse prose asks that her reader also recede from the world and embrace the unsaid – ‘you can always withdraw a little bit further’, reads the epigraph. These short narratives operate on two planes, perhaps best divided as conscious and subconscious levels, and the reader would be best served by leaving their own personality at the shore and diving in.
Nors’ constant flipping from action in the present to trains of thought, entrenched in complex memories, prompts the reader to raise their heads above the water of the characters’ minds every so often. At times, one feels just as lost as the narrator of the title story, who explores the past, or ‘other realms’, in swimming. People bob in and out of situations, never really knowing themselves or those around them. Intimacy as a concept seems impossible in these 14 stories, as broken and distant as those who long for it.
Thus, striving to stay afloat is almost futile. Sentences start and finish in different directions, their clauses joined by a disorienting ‘and’ that feels perfunctory. In ‘Pershing Square’, a grave tale of burgeoning illness, a woman ‘puts her hand on her chest, something’s pressing inside, and there is ice on the lakes in Canada.’ In ‘Manitoba’, a solitary ex-teacher wishes for peace from rowdy teenagers, but sinister notes leak into his character throughout the course of the story: ‘…an aversion to death might keep them from his door, and there’s a glow over by the maple’. It’s not quite stream-of-consciousness, but these dreamy sentences read like glimpses of cerebral paths being re-trodden, wearied and worn in the minds of the characters.
The direction-changing ‘and’ is just one of the techniques repeated throughout the stories which invite the reader above the surface of deep introspection and memory. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the first story, ‘In a Deer Stand’. An overwrought husband injures his ankle while hiking, an attempt to escape his tense home life. Memories of his wife and an intruding character named Lisette are interrupted by the harsh present, the threat of frostbite and wolves. Ingenious typesetting in the Pushkin Press edition from 2020 cuts the first line’s ‘somebody’ in half, so the beginning of the second line reads ‘body will show up’. As the increasingly desperate protagonist imagines his wife contacting the police and striving to find him, the reader can imagine the opposite, and far more likely, outcome, as ‘a wolf has been sighted’.
A consistent sense of anticlimax pervades this collection: each time a story crests into something intriguingly macabre, the blankness of the next page heralds a truncated end. However many short paragraphs remain, however many two-word clauses and compact descriptions are left, one has to come to terms with the story as it is. Nors refuses to expand: expansion almost seems a luxury.
This attitude is shared by her characters, whose failing relationships belie a general reluctance for investing time in others. This is evidenced in ‘Compaction Birds’, where an attempt to elongate a one night stand ends in flat disappointment. Young love is confused and hopeless in ‘By Sydvest Station’, when a teenager named Lina is silently consumed by rejection from a boy who protested that ‘her love couldn’t be genuine… It was just compensation’. No explanation follows for why a teenage boy would have such a self-deprecating mindset, and Lina seems too stunned by the sentiment to expound on it further in her mind. Few characters are fired up by passion or anger – knowing one another intimately doesn’t even seem possible. Lina can’t tell her friend, Kirsten, about her heartbreak, as ‘she’s certain her reaction would be textbook, and nothing’s worse than someone who goes by the book’. There simply isn’t the impetus to share emotion openly, vulnerably.
This challenging collection asks a lot of the reader, and is sometimes difficult to stomach. A few of the characters are repulsive, with cruel desires and warped mindsets. Yet, these lonely, floating people and unlikeable misanthropes display the convincing power of Nors’ voice, and the strength of her narrative wild-swimming.
Charlotte Haley is a recent graduate of Regent’s Park College (2020), with a BA in Classics and English. For the last year, she has been working in Switzerland as a Gallery Assistant for a rare book dealer (while frantically trying to learn German!). Since graduating, she has co-written a short film about sexual health,The Clinic, produced by the BBC Arts New Creatives programme, and won the Kunsthalle Basel’s Online Writing Workshop in May of 2021 for her poem, I Like Basel But. Charlotte’s writing of all forms, published or otherwise, can be found on her blog, IOLIS (I Only Like It Sometimes). Her pronouns are she/they.