Dorthe Nors's Range: An Astrophysicist Retreats from Reality
Dorthe Nors's fifth novel Range follows astrophysicist Gunn Haven to rural Denmark, where a filming stranger and a shy teenager derail "the Work".
Programme
- Range is Danish author Dorthe Nors's fifth full-length novel.
- The protagonist, Gunn Haven, is an eminent professor of astrophysics who moves to rural Denmark, telling a local newspaper: "It's to do with the sky."
- Gunn should be writing a general introduction to astrophysics, "the Work", but is distracted by Krista, a local factory worker, and Jenny, a teenager she helps with a school project on black holes.
An eminent professor of astrophysics moves to rural Denmark and tells the local newspaper: "It's to do with the sky." From the outset of Range, Danish author Dorthe Nors's fifth full-length novel, it is apparent this is not the whole truth.
Soon after arriving, Gunn Haven is compelled to trespass along a nearby track to look at a farmhouse with collapsed gable walls. Her curiosity is driven by personal interest rather than scientific inquiry. A woman pulls up in a dark blue BMW. She is dressed in "hunter's camouflage, fleshy-faced. And ponytailed. Weapon raised: a phone, filming Gunn." Gunn reluctantly retreats.
Gunn is distracted by this woman, Krista, who works at the local potato flour factory. Gunn should be working on a general introduction to astrophysics, "the Work". Instead, the Professor finds herself wondering what "Gable Woman" would do if she came to "the Institute", where Gunn researches "light from the oldest galaxies". She would draw a dick on a blackboard, Gunn imagines, "with a small titillated smile".
Gunn is more generous to promising young scientists. She pays for a former student to travel to America. Closer to home, she begins to help Jenny, the teenage daughter of her hairdresser, with a school project on black holes. Jenny is an "uneducated creature" who smells "faintly of iron", with a "faint red to the cheeks, from shyness or cold. Oddly sexless, and she had been here before, but with her mother."
What emerges is a portrait of a scientist at odds with her surroundings — and perhaps with herself. Gunn's professional life concerns the oldest light in the universe; her new life in the countryside concerns collapsed gables, a factory worker with a phone camera, and a shy teenager. Nors lets the gap between these two worlds do the work, and the tension between Gunn's stated reason for relocating and her actual behaviour structures the novel's opening movement.
The book joins Nors's small but sharply observed body of full-length fiction. As the story of Gunn, Krista and Jenny develops, Range promises to test whether an astrophysicist trained to study distant galaxies can read what is directly in front of her.
Source: Guardian Books
