About four or five years ago, the Danish concept of hygge gained traction in North America, engendering the publication and sales of various tomes, which, for the price of $24.95, promised to guide the overworked and unfulfilled American population to blissful, cozy fulfillment. Hygge is both a term and a way of life. This practice — meant to bring contentment and well-being through manifestations of coziness, like fireplaces and cashmere socks—was an appealing alternative to a way of living that optimized productivity over leisure and comfort. But even coziness can start to feel suffocating—the fire gets too hot; the socks too impractical. It’s this discomfort within comfort explored in “Hygge,” a story from Wild Swims, the new short story collection from Danish author Dorthe Nors. First published in Danish in 2018, the collection’s English translation was released in North America last month by Graywolf Press. A collection of fourteen stories, Wild Swims addresses loss, isolation, longing, and the specters of melancholy. The stories in the collection are cerebral: they’re centered around characters suspended in memory, individuals that desperately grasp for the past to explain an unforgiving present. 

In “Hygge,” a professor is engaged in a relationship with a woman that he thinks very little of: she is one of many “cast-off women and their expectations” at the senior club to which he’s  recently become a member. Although the professor has chosen to spend his time with this woman, whose name is Lilly, his disdain is palpable. He is disgusted by her home, its “bathroom littered with laundry” and its “sweetish smell of urine.” He associates this latter detail with his Aunt Clara, who he had been forced to spend afternoons with as a child. 

Despite the years that have surely passed, the professor maintains a childish resentment towards those boyhood afternoons, and it infects the time he spends with Lilly. In some ways, the professor sees no distinction between his aunt and his current lover: Both are alcoholics whose loneliness he is forced to manage. He resents this responsibility: “I’ve never understood why Aunt Clara’s loneliness required my involvement.” Though he is referring to his aunt, this admission could be just as easily applied to Lilly. 

Following 2014’s Karate Chop, Nors’s second story collection is masterful in its compression of time; the professor’s recollection traverses hours and years, yet it feels like it happens in the briefest of moments. The story’s title is, of course, ironic: even in the most hygge of settings—candles, blankets, crackling fires—sourness prevails. In fact, in Nors’ “Hygge,” coziness turns sinister; after Lilly implores the professor to “just be cozy,” the story ends with Lilly lying on the floor, “eyes gawping” and the professor declaring his defense. 

Many of the stories in the collection take this shape. Seemingly sweet, unassuming moments are interrupted by gray realities. In “Inside St. Paul’s,” at the tomb of “Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount” a man grapples with his own insignificance. Shocked by the relative warmth of the sarcophagus, he recalls the cold of the hockey rink he visited as a child with his father and brother. As a boy, the man dreamed of achieving a greatness equal to the hockey players skating in “wide, confident circles.” Faced with the warm and ill-preserved body of Sir Nelson, “dead, and easily defeatable,” the smallness of the man’s life is thrown into stark perspective. He attempts to recreate his childhood feelings of ambition but ends up feeling more dejected. In “On Narrow Paved Paths,” a busybody comes to terms with her impending death by managing the illness and consequent death of a close friend. In “The Fairground,” a deserted fairground, “trampled and singed,” acts as a metaphor for a woman’s disillusionment with love. 

In these stories, love and success are always just out of grasp, while isolation, illness, and death remain constants. Nors’ spare and precise prose makes these feelings of insecurity and despair so tangible that reading these stories is an unsettling experience. 

Full of strange and shocking stories, Wild Swims will both confuse you and make you laugh out loud. The stories are quick and easy to read, but you’ll want to sit with them and dissect every little detail.