Karate Chop: Stories by Dorthe Nors (review)

The bleak and mysterious landscapes imbued with streaks of violence that Danish writer Dorthe Nors explores in Karate Chop (her first book of fiction to be translated into English and winner of the prestigious P. O. Enquist Literary Prize for 2014) are as often interior planes as physical locations, the violence done to her characters more frequently bloodless. And in their cunning, deceptively casual accrual of detail, they form quiet, urgent studies of personal suffering rather than painting dioramas of social distress.

The studies here follow one another like the jottings in a naturalist’s notebook, observing the habitat and habits of the indigenes: a girl in her family bedroom chasing her thoughts down mental tunnels after a first sexual encounter, a resentful old man deriding the young mothers he meets on the path in the city park, a lovelorn young woman seeking refuge in the far corners of urban graveyards, a teenager following her troubled mother into the vortices of the intertidal Wadden Sea.

Nors’s sly humor prevents even the harshest stories from tipping into bathos. By calling the title story “Karate Chop” Nors cleverly provides another perspective on the meditations of a social worker who desperately wants to believe the men she dates are better than they say they are, until one violent event destroys her illusions. As she examines her bruised, naked body in the mirror while her attacker sleeps undisturbed in her bed, her first instinct is to find responsibility within: “There had to be a reason, and one had first to look to oneself to discover what was wrong.” But as she cycles through her familiar rationales and the tropes of the academic discourse, she can find no reason.

Most of the collection’s stories are quite brief, many finishing up in under four pages, and yet they contain whole lives, and ways of life. “Mutual Destruction” forms a small study of the internal rhythms of hate as it traces the uneasy companionship between neighbors Henrik and Morten in rural Jutland, whose bond is further destabilized by Morten’s wife, who “talked big” and covered the walls of her house with “what they called expressive art.” Nors’s dark humor infiltrates even the most frightening or sorrowful of circumstances. The men have a pact to shoot each other’s hunting dogs when they get ill or outlive their usefulness. “A clean shot when the dog’s doing something it likes is a good death for a dog,” Henrik considers. “He wouldn’t mind going that way himself one day when he was as far up Tina as he could get.”

As with most of the stories, we never learn the name of the protagonist of “Hair Salon.” Yet the things these anonymous characters do and feel and observe, the things that mark them, are too specific for them to be merely emblems of a kind of experience; it is more that an encompassing shame and humiliation, a sense of their own troubled unimportance, keeps their names suppressed.

The narrator of “Hair Salon” has moved to a cheap district and is, for unstated reasons, “down in the dumps.” In a flat, depressive tone she describes her visits to the beauty parlor, where she smokes and gossips with the stylist, who gives her a discount for being his buddy. Together they make fun of the fat lady on the block who goes everywhere with her dog that can’t bark. She gives it drugs to keep it quiet so she’ll be allowed to keep it in her flat. “I wonder if it knows it’s out of its skull,” the narrator wonders, though she also experiences the world through a gauze of sedation. At the Laundromat, she recalls, the fat lady “took control” of her laundry, a small humiliation she accepted without protest while the woman took each piece of underwear and put them in the spinner. The narrator is both obscured and utterly exposed by her unnamed grief. “Now she thinks she...