About the Book
A heart-rending work of autofiction from one of Norway's most prominent literary writers
'By writing down what happened, by telling the story as truthfully as I can, I'm trying to bring them together into one body - the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983. I don't know if it can be done'
Paris, a winter's night in 1983. She is sixteen years old, lost in unfamiliar streets. On a scrap of paper in her pocket is the address of a photographer, K, thirty years her senior. Almost four decades later, as her life and the world around her begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before.
Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion. As in her landmark previous work, Unquiet, Linn Ullmann continues to probe the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris.
Girl, 1983 is a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.
About the Author :
Linn Ullmann (Author)
Linn Ullmann is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Scandinavian literature. Her novels have been translated into over twenty languages, and she has received numerous awards, including the Amalie Skram Prize, the Dobloug Prize and the Aschehoug Prize - all for her collected body of work. Girl, 1983 was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize, as was its predecessor Unquiet, published by Hamish Hamilton in 2020. The two novels form part of an ongoing trilogy, meditating on memory, rage and desire.
Martin Aitken (Translator)
Martin Aitken's translations of Scandinavian fiction are widely published. His work has appeared on the shortlists of the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award and the US National Book Awards, among other prizes. He received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019 and, for the first book in the Morning Star cycle, the US National Translation Award in Prose in 2022. He lives in Denmark
Review :
Over seven taut, sharp but elusive novels, the Norwegian writer Linn Ullmann has sought to refine experience into stories that carve order, even beauty, from a shadowed past . . . Girl, 1983 nods to Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras and other kindred literary spirits - but her method and manner has a tact and finesse all its own . . . If her fictions transcend the raw stuff of autobiography, they never deny the soil from which they spring . . . Ullmann crafts her words with unflagging care
Girl, 1983 is now available in an English translation by Martin Aitken, who creates a restrained yet fraught atmosphere for a story that [Ullmann] sums up succinctly early on: ‘The story about the photograph makes me sick, it’s a shitty story.’ Post–Me Too, readers will likely have assumptions about where a shitty story involving a dramatic age gap, an isolating transatlantic journey, and the world of fashion photography will lead. And many of these assumptions will prove correct, but Ullmann’s probing tale is much more than the sum of its abusive or creepy particulars; it explores, among other ideas, the power struggle between forgetting and remembering and the line between fiction and nonfiction
While Ullmann is describing her exploitation as a young woman, she brings such precision and honesty to the telling, the book transcends the familiar #MeToo outline. An accomplished author . . . Ullmann captures the splintered, slippery nature of memory itself - a far more faithful rendering of how the mind works
A reader might get the sense that Ullmann has removed the top of her head in order to reveal the choreography of her mind. And yet, Ullmann calls this introspective book a novel, imposing some distance between herself and the story she’s told. She challenges the idea that memoir is more intimate than fiction, and manipulates genre to express a vulnerable relationship to her own cerebral archive: what she can claim to know, what she can’t bear to face, what she has lost
Girl, 1983 powerfully transmits the feelings of shame and guilt that are deflected on the innocent victim
Linn Ullmann's writing, already distinct for its rare moral clarity, attains a new authority in Girl, 1983. It is the authority of focus, of a grip on life that grows more tenacious as its scope determinedly narrows. In the manner of Annie Ernaux, Ullmann uses the act of attention as a weapon against indifference. It is as though, by reconstructing the disorder of certain realities, she is able to confer sanity on them. Yet there is also a brightness and generosity to her work that seems to turn its themes - the powerlessness of youth and femininity, the intermingling of memory and shame - inside out
Girl, 1983?unearths one young woman’s exhilaration, confusion, and darkness on the cusp of adulthood, drawn inexorably to glamour, only to discover its raw agonies. Linn Ullmann is a master of calm devastation; this is a haunting book
Linn Ullmann’s new novel, Girl, 1983, is both beautiful and unsettling. A slow exploration of the narrator’s past becomes a quiet and disturbing interrogation of the world’s treatment of young women. Here beauty is a dangerous possession, drawing its owner into silence and complicity with those who would harm her. Brava to Ullmann for bravely taking on this dark subject, one which permeates our culture
An engrossing, intimate narrative . . . award-winning novelist Ullmann meditates on memory, anxiety, and loss in a disquieting tale . . . In precise, lyrical prose, Ullmann creates a captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself, caught in a spiral of fear and loneliness
It reminded me of Renata Adler, Lena Andersson, Annie Ernaux. I loved it
