Dorthe Nors builds her novels around the same essential problem: a woman whose inner logic is coherent to herself and opaque to everyone around her. In Range, that woman is Gunn Haven, an astrophysicist who studies light from the oldest galaxies and cannot, for reasons the novel keeps partly obscured, tell a local reporter the real reason she has moved to rural Denmark. That gap — between what Gunn knows and what she says, between her professional precision and her personal disorder — is where Nors wants to work. The territory is familiar from Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, Nors's Booker-shortlisted 2017 novel about Sonja, a translator of Swedish crime fiction learning to drive. That book derived its quiet comedy from juxtaposition: graphic violence rendered into perfect language by a woman who cannot navigate a gated stick shift. Range tries for something darker. Gunn receives a dead bird in her post box, a 'For Sale' sign migrates toward her property, and a woman named Krista — camouflaged, ponytailed, phone raised like a weapon — begins to shadow her. The hostility is real but its source is deliberately murky, filtered through Gunn's memories of a poor childhood, a dead mother, a loving father whose affection expressed itself through equations. The best writing is in the margins. The scenes between Gunn and Jenny, the teenager she tutors through a school project on black holes, carry the novel's genuine emotional weight. Jenny smells 'faintly of iron,' has 'a faint red to the cheeks, from shyness or cold,' and is described in fragments that signal Gunn's attention without fully naming her feeling. Caroline Waight's translation handles this register well — the broken syntax reads as perception, not error. The novel's serious problem is Gunn herself, specifically the gap between what we are told about her and what the prose shows us. An astrophysicist renowned enough that her relocation makes the local newspaper cannot be made credibly to confuse thunder and lightning. Her 'Work' — the popular introduction to astrophysics she is supposedly writing — is described in terms so vague it reads like genre decoration rather than genuine engagement with scientific thought. Her misreading of Persuasion (she skims to the end, decides the moral is 'to listen to Lady Russell') is meant to be revealing, but the reveal is too easy: a woman who mistakes compression for understanding, projected onto Jane Austen. The Austen parallel is the novel's thematic backbone, and Nors telegraphs it several chapters before it pays off. What saves Range from its own schematic tendencies is a line the reviewer lifts from the earlier novel, about people forced out of the provinces to Copenhagen: 'Shaming the provinces is just a covert form of deportation.' That self-awareness, turned against the novel's own protagonist, is the sharpest thing here. Gunn's contempt for Krista, for the potato flour factory, for the imagined woman drawing a dick on a blackboard — it is rural shaming performing as intellectual sensitivity. Nors knows this. Whether she fully dramatizes it, rather than merely indicating it, is a different question.
