laundry0099@bookwyrm.social reviewed Zur See by Dörte Hansen
Slow but beautiful
3 stars
Poignant and sad in a Lord of the Rings sort of way. Just as LotR is set against the backdrop of the once High Elven culture waning as the elves depart Middle Earth to sail west, Zur See is set in the present day North Sea. Here, the families who once built wooden houses with thatched roofs and sent their sons out to sea perhaps never to return are fading away in the face of high rise hotels on the beach for the flip flop wearing mainlanders.
It’s about the slow, inexorable decay of life and of a culture— a dying language whose only remaining speakers are recorded by linguists for their archives, an island of people who used to make their living from the sea who now cater to tourists, a marriage slowly drifting apart…
I have never been to the North Sea. Yet this book filled …
Poignant and sad in a Lord of the Rings sort of way. Just as LotR is set against the backdrop of the once High Elven culture waning as the elves depart Middle Earth to sail west, Zur See is set in the present day North Sea. Here, the families who once built wooden houses with thatched roofs and sent their sons out to sea perhaps never to return are fading away in the face of high rise hotels on the beach for the flip flop wearing mainlanders.
It’s about the slow, inexorable decay of life and of a culture— a dying language whose only remaining speakers are recorded by linguists for their archives, an island of people who used to make their living from the sea who now cater to tourists, a marriage slowly drifting apart…
I have never been to the North Sea. Yet this book filled me with a wistfulness and nostalgia for the days when men went to sea and their women stayed behind to raise their children alone and wait for their return. And at the same time, this book managed to make me feel the suffering and hardships that this way of life brought with it. It’s actually quite astounding how one novel can evoke such a foreign and extremely specific emotion in the reader.
The being said, this was not a book that I stayed up all night to finish reading. I had to more or less force myself to pick it up and read out of the sheer stubbornness I have about finishing books that I start. But despite the slow pacing and apparent lack of plot, the emotional payoff when you realize that somehow you have become deeply invested in these characters was a true joy.
Even though it was a bit of a slog to get through, there were some passages that took my breath away with their ability to capture all the beauty and melancholy of life.
