Title: Karate Chop: Stories
Author: Dorthe Nors
Translator: Martin Aitken
Published by: Graywolf Press
My rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Where I got the book: Public library
Content warning: Domestic violence
“Karate Chop, Dorthe Nors’s acclaimed story collection, is the debut book in the collaboration between Graywolf Press and A Public Space. These fifteen compact stories are meticulously observed glimpses of everyday life that expose the ominous lurking under the ordinary. While his wife sleeps, a husband prowls the Internet, obsessed with female serial killers; a bureaucrat tries to reinvent himself, exposing goodness as artifice when he converts to Buddhism in search of power; a woman sits on the edge of the bed where her lover lies, attempting to locate a motive for his violence within her own self-doubt. Shifting between moments of violence (real and imagined) and mundane contemporary life, these stories encompass the complexity of human emotions, our capacity for cruelty as well as compassion. Not so much minimalist as stealthy, Karate Chop delivers its blows with an understatement that shows a master at work.” (Source)
Honestly this is going to be a pretty short review. I’ve been super busy starting a new job and this collection honestly didn’t make a big enough impression for me to remember much of it.
I’d never heard to Dorthe Nors but she’s a pretty big deal in Denmark. She’s the first Danish author to have been published in the New Yorker, her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize and she was the recipient of Danish Arts Agency’s Three Year Grant for “her unusual and extraordinary talent.” Based on this info I went in to Karate Chop expecting a fair amount and ended up largely disappointed.
The stories themselves were well written and I can still remember bits of atmospheric detail. But largely the stories lacked a narrative arc to hold them together, causing the collection to fall flat. I do enjoy stories where there is no traditional resolution and denouement but the stories in Karate Chop just kind of trailed off and left me struggling to remember what happened minutes after finishing them.
I’m not sure I’d read another of Nors’ short story collections but might pick up one of her novels at some point. However, after the disappointing reading experience of Karate Chop I’m in no hurry to do so.
Advertisements Share this:
