The Land of Short Sentences
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A young mother follows her partner to a rural community in West Jutland, Denmark, where he teaches at the local school for adult education. Isolated, she is forced to find her way in a bewildering community and in the inscrutable conversational forms of the local population.
A young woman relocates to an outlying community in West Jutland, Denmark, and is forced to find her way, not only in the bewildering environment of the residential Folk High School, where her partner has been hired to teach, but also in the inscrutable conversational forms of the local population. And on top of it all, there's the small matter of juggling her roles as mother to a newborn baby and advice columnist in the local newspaper. In this understated and hilarious novel, Stine Pilgaard conjures a tale of venturing into new and uncharted land, of human relationships, dilemmas, and the ways and byways of social intercourse.
About this Author
Stine Pilgaard is a graduate of the Danish Writers' Academy and the University of Copenhagen. Her first novel, Min mor siger ("My Mother Says"), was a critical and commercial success, earning a nomination for the prestigious Danish Broadcasting Corporation Literature Prize and securing its author the Bodil and Jørgen Munch-Christensen Award for a debut author. In 2016, Pilgaard received the Danish Libraries' Writers Award and was nominated for the Danish Readers' Book Award for Lejlighedssange ("Songs for Special Occasions"). The Land of Short Sentences was an instant bestseller in Denmark, where it was released to critical acclaim. Pilgaard hails from the city of Aarhus and lives in Velling, an outlying rural community close to Ringkøbing in Jutland, Denmark.
Hunter Simpson is originally from North Carolina and lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Stine Pilgaard's The Land of Short Sentences (World Editions, 2022) was his first published literary translation and won Scandinavian American Foundation's Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize for 2021. My Mother Says will be his second published translation.
Reviews
Praise for The Land of Short Sentences
"Stine Pilgaard's novel is a charming chamber work, focusing on a handful of characters in a relatively isolated location, from the perspective of a protagonist struggling to find her own place in society"-- Tobias Carroll, Words Without Border
"In this charming and funny novel, a woman tries to settle into a remote Danish community with her boyfriend and baby son. She struggles to make small talk with locals (hence the title), tries very hard to learn to drive and resents the way parenthood has reduced her vocabulary to "compound words": "wet wipes, high chair, sippy cup". Her job as a newspaper advice columnist reveals that others aren't any better at navigating social interactions: one correspondent wants to talk to her parents about philosophy but finds that "they try to turn the conversation back to wind energy as quickly as possible". "Everyone you meet is on the way somewhere," a friend advises, and the buzz of people coming and going through the pages, and the warmth and wit of the narrator's voice, make it a pleasure to be in her company." -- The Guardian
"Translated from Danish, this gentle satire about orderly Scandinavians is set on a provincial school campus. (...) I loved this different and refreshing novel. It's wise, funny and sad by turns and has a powerful sense of place."-- The Daily Mail
"Playful, funny, and colorful without being showy, rendering the world of a Folk High School in West Jutland with warmth and precision and the voice of the novel's witty fish-out-of-water narrator with panache." --Jury, Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize for Translation, 2021
"Small communities love their inside jokes, which become all the more (and paradoxically) hilarious if an outsider takes them seriously. Pilgaard's smart, layered parody will make you laugh without knowing exactly why, and then will keep you laughing at your self-consciousness." --VERONICA RAIMO, author of The Girl at the Door
"A different and refreshing novel. It's wise, funny and sad by turns and has a powerful sense of place." --Daily Mail
"A gentle observational comedy. ... Pilgaard draws out a great deal of warmth and humour from the narrator's attempts to connect with the locals." --The Herald
"A master of irony lays down her weapons ... a deliciously crumbly novel oozing with awkward love." --Weekendavisen
"A sheer delight: Stine Pilgaard has penned a perfect comedy about normalcy." --Dagbladet Information
"The book of the year ... an absolutely fabulous novel about adjusting to midlife in the back of beyond." --Jyllands-Posten
"Stine Pilgaard has a pronounced talent for parody. She can write in such a way as to make you laugh out loud, bringing into the open the things we find embarrassing, capturing the absurdities of everyday life. Her dialogues are natural and precise, her language clear and succinct, and her references plain and recognizable. But beneath the lightness of her prose lies something other and more than comedy and rhetoric." --Berlingske
"Another Pilgaard pearl ... too funny for words and at the same time so keenly intelligent in its depictions. You love her characters to bits and understand so well their faltering steps on the road to community. A book you'll cherish reading--again and again and ..." --Søndag
"Stine Pilgaard's crisp prose and supreme timing can be spotted fifty books away ... an exquisite pearl of a book ... wonderfully funny, playful, and subtle in its crafting. But don't be mistaken: beneath the humor there's a worldly-wise voice with a finely honed ability to put into words all that's profound and beautiful and good about life ... This is one of the best works of Danish literature I've read in ages." --Litteratursiden
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