by Shirley Dees
August 18, 2026
Range by Dorothy Nors; translated by Caroline Waight; Graywolf; 320 pages; $18.00.
In a world where the answer to any mystery of the world lays at our fingertips, it’s easy to believe that knowledge is power. However, with her hypnotic work in Range, Dorthe Nors pushes back on society’s standard of excess, forcing readers to sit in isolation and work through limitations of knowledge. The story follows Gunn, a single, middle-aged astrophysicist living on Denmark's west coast who prefers a life immersed in quiet routine. Nors explores Gunn’s relationship with loneliness, and the struggle of finding her place in both the lives of others and the wider spaces of the universe, serving as a contemporary comment on emotional distance, resilience, and the conjoined struggles and rewards of reaching beyond personal boundaries. Translated by Caroline Waight, Range is a novel in which nothing is explained and where compression, negative space, and an intimate third person narration build its non-traditional plot. In this manner, Nors crafts a fiction where observation governs the reader’s experience and matters of patience and inference are rewarded.
Rather than deliver a work of prose constructed on traditional fundamentals of storytelling, Nors refuses to write explicitly, relying on miniscule gestures of interrupted conversations and physical movements to portray Range’s many emotional states. By compressing details into small moments, readers infer the tensions taking place in the story. One example of this in the novel lies in Gunn’s constant avoidance and topic changes revolving around “the boy,” an unknown character depicted through intermittent text messages that list coordinates, vague snapshots, and a single photograph carefully placed in the main character’s home. When Gunn is asked about “the boy” by her young and inquisitive neighbor, Jenny, Gunn leaves these questions unanswered and often abruptly changes the subject. Nors even goes so far to place narrative interruptions of interior observations between lines of dialogue surrounding “the boy” to disrupt the pacing of the conversation and abandon emotional resolution. This method of writing deepens the readers curiosities about the characters, compelling them to read further. By avoiding explicitly naming Gunn’s emotional connections to the boy through these tactics, Nors allows the reader to infer the significance of the undescribed and unexplained male’s relationship with her main character.
Additionally, Nors replaces physical movement for emotional explanation, trusting that readers can and will understand a character’s emotional state based on the actions they perform rather than the words they speak. Nors is a fan of “show, not tell,” and leaves the actions in the scene to speak for her characters and leaving her readers to infer their interiority. We’re led to watch Gunn move through routine and repetition, chores like feeding, grooming, or standing with her horse, as the author illustrates how her character may be anxious in the moment. With these tools at work, replication becomes the grounding mechanism for both Nors’s characters and her readers. By refusing to explain themselves, Nors’s characters offer posture, gesture, and interactions with the objects around them to allow the reader’s inference to do the heavy lifting.
Furthermore, the use of negative space in Range requires the reader to recreate the story’s narrative movement, as Nors frequently ignores the dramatic moments a conventional novel would emphasize. As a result, the story arc’s turning points and plot movements happen completely off the page. Shifts in routine, dialogue, or locations between scenes do the work of marking the literary changes of the story. The white spaces on the page are free for the reader to fill in with their own interpretations of what’s occurred based on their inferences of these before-and-after sequences. Nors will end a scene before an anticipated explanation occurs, and begins a new section after the resulting consequences have ended. In this way, the stories move through what is implied, rather than overly dramatized instants occurring directly right on the page.
Likewise, Nors’s use of a third-person intimate point-of-view creates a narrative distance that is typically viewed as a frustrating element for a reader to overcome, but is instead given significance due to the grounding Nors provides in providing a solid structure of inference. The reader has been conditioned to work through the novel with observance and expects a level of implication that makes this type of writing style successful. Because the reader cannot and will not outwardly know what Gunn or the surrounding characters are feeling, external observances are heightened in importance, and Nors emphasizes these components by focusing on them in nearly every scene. The landscape and physical objects present in the narrative, and even how Gunn perceives and notes these observations, replace interior monologues or long sections of narrative summary. Everything tangible in the story acts as a clue to the current stakes of the plot. This leads Waight’s translation of the novel to carry the substantial importance of maintaining Nors’s style of precision and restraint. Waight’s sentences contain only what is necessary, allowing ambiguity to control the tone of the translation, staying true to what makes Range unique. The prose in Waight’s translation never slides into the decorative or excessive, and honors the cadence and expertise of Nors’s craft.
In today’s age of fast-paced action, and information overload, it feels good to be rewarded for patience. Range’s governing metaphor is easily summarized in the book’s most oft-quoted phrase, “What do I know? What do I know that I don’t know? What would I like to know?” Where uncertainty is championed, and inference is placed on a pedestal, Range is a product in the prizes of slowing down and taking the time to admire literary art in Nors’s sophisticated iteration.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
"What do I know that I don't know?": Power and Inference in Dorothy Nors's Range
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Abrek Okur from Pexels
Shirley Dees earned an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her fiction has appeared in Empty House Press, After Happy Hour Review, Bright Flash Literary, Bangalore Review, and others. When not writing, Shirley is busy supporting staff and student needs at her rural school district, and reading beneath the shade of centuries-old oak trees. She lives in south Texas with her husband, daughter, two princess barn cats, and geriatric pet turtle.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© 2026 Iron Oak Editions
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Substack Roots & Words
