Girl, 1983

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 kindered 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 -- Boyd Tonkin * Financial Times * 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 -- Rachel Cusk 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 -- Roxana Robinson 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 * Kirkus * Linn Ullmann has mastered the art of seeing into the dark mysteries that make us who we are Among Norway’s contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence * John Freeman, LitHub * Ullmann is masterfully precise with language, pinning a wealth of detail in a simple phrase * Time Out * Ullmann’s grasp of the ambiguous natures of her people and her understanding of their background is admirably strong . . . she has a keenness of ear and eye, and a sharpness of mind, that is all her own * Independent * 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 * Washington Post * 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 * Atlantic *