When Gunn Haven, an eminent professor of astrophysics at an urban university, moves to rural Denmark, she tells a 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 is compelled to trespass along a nearby track to look at a farmhouse with collapsed gable walls, her curiosity 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.”
The construction of that sentence – from fragments and obtrusive conjunctions – is typical of Caroline Waight’s English translation of Range. The novel’s imagery is equally difficult to understand. During a lecture, Gunn thinks: “I’m coated in saliva.” Speculating on how a colony on Mars might develop, she says: “second generation: identical glasses and spit”.
Nors’s previous novel translated into English, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, is also about a woman whose interior world is at odds with external reality. The novel, shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker prize, follows Sonja, a middle-aged translator of Swedish crime novels, as she embarks on driving lessons. Sonja makes a living finding just the right words for acts of graphic violence. The novel’s subtle humour comes in the juxtaposition between the details of this violence and the mundane challenges of Sonja’s life, such as learning to use a gated stick shift. In Range, the incongruity between Gunn and those around her feels darker and more cryptic. Gunn receives a dead bird in her post box and a “For Sale” sign is moved close to her house. These hostile acts trigger memories of Gunn’s early life, which filter through her studies of the universe’s earliest light. Gunn’s mother died in a traffic accident. Her childhood with her father was poor but loving, with “moments of equations so long they went beyond any greasy cooker hood”. This might explain why, in adult life, Gunn is so concerned with the celestial that she fails to understand more local phenomena, such as other people.
Gunn’s thinking, however, is improbably imprecise. “The Work” is jumbled and vague. Gunn imagines evolution will soon mean “we’ll be born with Vaseline glands”. If this construction is distracting, the following description is dismaying: “But she didn’t get that far: she heard the car before she saw it. Rather like with thunder, and she turned back to the living room, crouched.” Gunn, an astrophysicist so renowned that her moving house is reported in the local newspaper, seems to believe that thunder is heard before lightning is seen.
Gunn is interested in Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion because “the word was nice”. She buys a copy of a Danish translation and is disappointed to find a glaring mistake on page one (“1810” had become “1801”). “Such sloppiness was unforgivable, and the sentences trickled on and on, riddled with mistakes no doubt.” She impatiently flips to the end of the book and decides that the story’s moral is “to listen to Lady Russell”, a “seemingly childless” widow who is “like a mother” to the central character, Anne. There is an obvious parallel between Lady Russell and Gunn, who we learn is both mentor and mentee, taken in by the woman from whom she inherited the house. The scenes of awkward intimacy between Gunn and Jenny are the tender heart of Range, but they are wrapped in a predictable plot, leading to an unconvincing altercation with “brutish” Krista that confirms Gunn’s prejudices about rural life. I kept thinking of a line from Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, in which Sonja comments on the many people who feel forced to move from the countryside to Copenhagen: “Shaming the provinces is just a covert form of deportation.”
• Range by Dorthe Nors, translated by Caroline Waight, is published by Pushkin. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
