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Loading... A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coastby Dorthe Nors
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. brilliant ( ) Not quite a travel book or a diary, this is a collection of very subjective essays about places on the North Sea coast and the people who live there, mostly in West Jutland, where Nors grew up, but with a couple of excursions into Germany (Sylt) and the Netherlands (Den Helder and Texel). Nors writes about sand dunes, birds, wind and waves, about fishing communities, churches and lighthouses, but also about tourism and industry and the effects they have had on nature and coastal communities. It's all very much like her fiction: on the surface it looks so delicately put together that a gentle breeze would be enough to scatter it, when in fact there's a lot of very well thought-out Danish engineering going on out of sight. We read about Børglum Abbey, which has been known to disappear from view for short times, about the fabulous naive wall-paintings in Jutland churches, about the women of Fanø, about surfer culture of "Cold Hawaii" and about the pollution from Cheminova. And about all kinds of other fascinating things. I have a sudden urge to get on my bike and do a tour of Jutland... no reviews | add a review
"Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It's a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct. Dorthe Nors's first nonfiction book chronicles a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast--from Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. In fourteen expansive essays, Nors traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors' ties to the region as well as her decision to move there from Copenhagen. She writes about the ritual burning of witch effigies on Midsummer's Eve; the environmental activist who opposed a chemical factory in the 1950s; the quiet fishing villages that surfers transformed into an area known as Cold Hawaii starting in the 1970s. She connects wind turbines to Viking ships, thirteenth-century church frescoes to her mother's unrealized dreams. She describes strong waves, sand drifts, storm surges, shipwrecks, and other instances of nature asserting its power over human attempts to ignore or control it. Through a deep, personal engagement with this singular landscape, A Line in the World accesses the universal. Its ultimate subjects are civilization, belonging, and change: changes within one person's life, changes occurring in various communities today, and change as the only constant of life on Earth."-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)948.95History and Geography Europe Fenno-Scandinavia Denmark and Finland JutlandLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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