Dorthe Nors’ beautiful A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast for 4Columns

We have lived in the golden age of the dérive, a century of psychogeography with Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Macfarlane, et al., all walking and writing, turning their attention to place. Many (me included) have followed Benjamin’s dictate: “To lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.” Entering this tradition in a sidewise fashion is Dorthe Nors, the Danish fiction writer, who is not in a city, not lost, and not walking. In her first nonfiction work, A Line in the World, she travels six hundred miles of the North Sea coast in her old Toyota with her parents’ stained road atlas… Continue reading for more on how Nors bends time and place so it holds memory and us, plus a tiny orange salamander that I rescue in the roads.