RANGE

A hypnotic novel by a Danish writer about the impossibly complicated search for one’s place in the universe.

Gunn Haven is an astrophysicist who studies gamma-ray bursts, or light traveling to Earth from the oldest galaxies. When the novel opens, she’s taken leave of her teaching job at the Institute and moved into a house in the country left to her by a woman named Magna. It’s not clear who Magna is or why she’s left Gunn her house. It’s also a mystery why Gunn is taking a sabbatical from teaching. Instead, the circumstances of Gunn’s life arrive in bursts: her childhood loss; the yellow house where she grew up, "with its oddities and flaws"; her father, who raised her on a diet of “numbers and spring rolls”; what she learned from Magna, including an interest in “weird children.” Occasionally, Gunn exchanges messages with Niels, a colleague who knows her perhaps better than anyone. She sometimes receives cryptic messages from "the boy," a young man of great intellectual promise (and therefore a weird child), whose journey around the world Gunn is funding against his parents’ wishes. Mostly, though, Gunn walks the roads around her house, solves equations, studies the night sky, takes the daughter of a neighbor under her wing, encouraging her to continue her education, and does her best to negotiate social situations that would appear ordinary to most but are treacherous for her. “What do I know?” she asks herself on several occasions. “What do I know that I don’t know? What would I like to know?” Repeated encounters with a difficult neighbor challenge Gunn’s faith in the scientific method of observing, noting, and concluding. In this stirring work, Nors has done the impossible: given shape to the twin mysteries of identity and consciousness without pinning either down.

A brilliant novel that is as intellectually vast as it is deeply rooted in the everyday experience of being human.