'' RANGE '' DANISH BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

' Range,' By Dorthe Nors. Translated by Caroline Waight. Isolation and longing beneath the stars. This is a rare novel whose language and structure delicately enact its wrenching themes.

The trespassing begins early in ' Range, ' the Danish writer Dorthe Nors's new novel.

Gunn Haven, an astrophysics professor and oddball, has taken a partial leave from her job at '' the Institute '' in an unnamed city to live in a rural backwater of her childhood, recording  gamma-ray bursts in the sky and writing a book about the stars.

Her exploration up and down the area's muddy trails quickly lead her to what she thinks is an  abandoned farmhouse, until she notices the cameras lashed to trees.

Within minutes a dark blue BMW arrives and a  '' battle-clad woman '' emerges, standing '' with her feet, planted wide,'' and bearing down on her interloper with a not-so-veiled threat : '' This is a private property, the road ends here.''

It won't be the last time Gunn is confronted by the menacing figure she calls ''Gable Woman.'' And the episode is only one of many intrusions. - geographical, interpersonal, existential  -layered through this piercing, exhilarating novel of isolation and yearning.

'' Range '' is Nors's sixth book to appear in English, this one translated by Caroline Waight.

In both her fiction [ including the International Booker Prize finalist '' Mirror, Shoulder, Signal '' and the story collection '' Wild Swims '' ] and her travel memoir, '' A Line in the World : A Year on the North Sea Coast,'' Nors writes characters - including herself - who sidestep convention and pay price for doing so.

They are observant, mordant and in various ways dislocated; ''misfit'' is the common descriptor.

But Nors's work is a sly rebuke to that word :  Why must the individual be blamed for missing the fit? Why can't society soften, open itself more generously to all of us.

For Gunn, this question is old, deeply internalized scar tissue. Now in her late 30s, she had long ago accepted her outsider status [ '' sometimes it feels like I turned left at the crossroads and everybody else turned right ''], while also learning to camouflage herself in the pink pumps and blouses required of women in academia.

Only in the classroom, surrounded by avid young minds, can she relax into herself, her equations clicking across the chalkboard in ribbons of injury and absorption.

!WOW! thanks Charlotte Wood.