Mirror, Shoulder, Signal
Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Danish writer Dorthe Nors. File under: Scandinavian literature can needle human emotion in a spectacular fashion – probably because it does so in an almost-but-not-quite dull manner. (One of the best books I’ve ever read is The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am by Norwegian author Kjersti Skomsvold.) I checked out the (few) 1-star reviews of this book after finishing, and as I predicted, they declared it “slow” and “meandering.” Well, I guess I’m a one-star gal because that’s what makes the novel work.
Sonja is a 40-something translator of Swedish crime novels (as is Nors), who is single, trying (unsuccessfully) to learn to drive, and who experiences bouts of vertigo that she can describe only by referencing “stones” in her head and the funny way that they ping and swirl to find equilibrium. (Anyone who is an empathetic “feeler” – there’s probably some Enneagram number for this person, but I don’t know the first thing about the Enneagram – knows *exactly* what this means. Descriptors aren’t cut-and-dry; they’re nuanced landscapes to pick apart and stack against wordless emotions.) Quietly, Nors illustrates how since leaving her small town in Jutland for Copenhagen, Sonja can’t quite connect with her conventional sister; this is the harbinger for how Sonja feels about her life in general. After recalling a particular happy memory of hiding in the rye near her childhood home, Sonja juts back to the present: “But that was eons ago… and there’s not much of that I can claim to have harvested, the love of men that is, and now here we are. In Frederiksberg Gardens, with filthy birds and happy people, and I’m not one of them.”
Sonja’s not “depressed,” per se, and if you’re a pensive person who’s constantly trying to figure out how you might fit in to your current circumstances – or if, in fact, you even do – you won’t think Mirror, Shoulder, Signal dull. Instead, you’ll find it a sometimes-funny (yes, indeed) look at human complexity.
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