Book Review: ‘Girl, 1983,’ by Linn Ullmann - The New York Times

Fiction

The Norwegian author Linn Ullmann’s new novel pieces together fragments of a trip she took to Paris at the request of a much older photographer.

A photo portrait of a woman with blond hair resting her chin on her right hand, looking directly into the camera. She has a blue sweater tied around her shoulders and a white cup with a straw rests on the table in front of her.

By Nadja Spiegelman

Nadja Spiegelman is the author of the memoir “I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This” and five books for children.

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GIRL, 1983, by Linn Ullmann; translated by Martin Aitken

How do you write about a part of your life you can’t remember? For the narrator of the Norwegian writer Linn Ullmann’s autofictional novel “Girl, 1983,” the not-remembering has become so urgent that it demands articulation. In 2019, the unnamed writer is in her mid-50s when a half memory resurfaces to haunt her: In the winter of 1983, when she was 16, she insisted on traveling alone from her mother’s home in New York to Paris at the request of a much older, famous photographer.

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As the memory floods back, the narrator feels like she is floating several inches above the ground while walking the dog; she lies on the bathroom floor, unable to bring herself to shower. She seeks out a psychiatrist, but he is of little use. She tells people she is “hard at work” on a book about the girl she was in 1983, but this is a lie; she can’t find the words. And then, as the ghost of her former self sits beside her, she begins to write through the fog.

“Be accurate. I can’t. Be specific. I don’t know how,” Ullmann writes. “Precision is the minimum requirement. Not just for writers and artists, but also for girls who claim they’re old enough to travel across the Atlantic by themselves and have their picture taken.”

But there is no precision in “Girl, 1983.” The book is endlessly recursive, as shapeless as water. It pools, eddies, evaporates. A blue coat and a red hat, worn on that trip to Paris, reappear and reappear and reappear. Little else ever comes into focus.

The narrative flips vertiginously between past and present, mimicking the movements of a mind circling trauma, repeating itself, reaching the threshold of a memory then darting away. The line breaks and white spaces threaten to overtake the type. The older woman’s present timeline is as vague as the past she tries to grasp. Dialogue exists only in fragments, scene hardly at all. The reader is often lost, with no authorial hand to steady us.

Ullmann is right that, for a writer, precision is the minimum. At times I wondered if this was simply a bad book. But each time that doubt crept in, a diamond of a sentence (“Will fear release its grip if I discover its origins?”) would catch me on its edge. Like an abstract painter who is capable of classical portraiture, Ullmann has elsewhere demonstrated a formidable capacity for narrative clarity. She rose to prominence as a literary critic in the 1990s; a New York Times profile called her “a James Wood of Norwegian writing.” She began publishing novels in her 30s, writing five over the next two decades before finally tackling the subject her own literary critics refused to let her avoid: her famous parents.

That sixth book, “Unquiet” — published in the United States in 2019, the precursor to “Girl, 1983” — explored her childhood as the daughter of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and the actor Liv Ullmann. Both books are billed as novels, but Norwegian literature does not police the category as fiercely as Anglophone literature does: Karl Ove Knausgaard, another writer of virkelighetslitteratur, or “reality fiction,” has said that Norway has no tradition of memoir as a distinct genre. From the photo of herself as an adolescent on the cover to the numerous parallels between the biographies of character and author, Ullmann invites her readers to interpret these texts as based on life.

Where in “Unquiet,” the photographer appears in a concise anecdote as “a convulsive insomniac, always high or low or strung out on some new or old drug,” with “long hair, his skin reminiscent of something a saddle maker would keep in the back of his store, aged, tan, cracked”; in “Girl, 1983” he is rendered as more of an absence than a presence. Ullmann is no longer interested in him, but rather in the girl she once was.

Bare shoulders. Dangling earrings. “The point is to look like a 20-year-old who looks like a 14-year-old,” the makeup artist tells her. The French fashion magazine that ran the photo is out of print and the narrator cannot find the copies she once kept all those years ago. She has the eerie sense that her younger self is now a stranger. No longer subject, but object: a body to gaze upon, not to gaze out from. This temporal vertigo is Ullmann’s true concern here. “By telling the story as truthfully as I can, I’m trying to bring them together in one body,” she writes: “the woman from 2021 and the girl from 1983. I don’t know if it can be done.”

Perhaps it cannot. Ullmann has written a portrait not of the girl but of the act of losing her. Though the project may be more useful to the writer than to the reader, she has nonetheless achieved something rare: She has created a reading experience as disorienting as one’s own ability to forget, capturing the way certain lapses of memory fuzz over into a white glare.

GIRL, 1983 | By Linn Ullmann | Norton | 267 pp. | $29.99