Girl, 1983
A heart-rending and beautiful literary novel one of Norway's most prominent, award-winning writers
-
- USD 14.99
-
- USD 14.99
Descripción editorial
'A masterpiece. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension' Ali Smith
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.
‘Ullmann’s gaze on the power and pain of a teenage girl as remembered and restaged by her adult self is unflinching and startling’ Deborah Levy
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A woman struggles to write about what she had long thought unwritable in this intense meditation on trauma and art from Ullmann (Unquiet). The narrator, a 55-year-old writer and translator in Oslo, recounts how at 16, while living in New York City, she met a 40-something fashion photographer in the elevator of her apartment building and accepted his invitation to a photo shoot in Paris, despite her mother's objections. Looking back, she cautiously approaches describing what is clearly a traumatic episode, the details of which she gradually comes to terms with ("the never-ending night, a night whose scope, nearly forty years on, I struggle to comprehend"). In her halting attempts to bring order and precision to her "spiral of restlessness, forgetfulness and unfinished stories," she finds inspiration and comfort in confessional writing by Sharon Olds, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Carson, each of whom "were here before me and who've been where I am now." The solemn tone never wavers, which some readers may find stultifying, but the narrator's vivid memories of her youth—colors, impressions, lacerating remarks—culminate in an unflinching description of the fateful encounter with the photographer. The result is a mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution.
