"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 begin 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's narrator 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.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
"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..." -- Clare McHugh - 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." -- Rachel Vorona Cote - Atlantic "[A] beautiful reflection on memory and desire... Elegantly spare and precise language heightens and underscores the woman's anxiety and unease. A quietly absorbing portrait of a woman in the grip of depression searching for the truth of her younger self." -- Booklist "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." -- Cory Oldweiler - Los Angeles Review of Books "Ullmann has sought to refine experience into stories that carve order, even beauty, from a shadowed past. Call what she does 'autofiction' if you will - 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." -- Financial Times "In precise, lyrical prose, Ullmann creates a captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself, caught in a spiral of fear and loneliness...An engrossing, intimate narrative." -- Kirkus (starred review) "[T]he narrator's vivid memories of her youth... culminate in an unflinching description of the fateful encounter with the photographer... [A] mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution." -- Publishers Weekly "Linn 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, author of The Position of Spoons "Linn Ullman'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, Ullman 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, author of Parade "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." -- Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History "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." -- Roxanna Robinson, author of Leaving "This book, about how we meet and understand the powers and the powerful vulnerabilities that form and have formed us, is written with extraordinary courage and a spirit that astounds. It's a work of real strength: poetic, witty, vital, cool and fevered both at once. Girl, 1983 does more than hold the self at all its ages. It pushes the fused power of memoir and story to a new dimension. I think it's a masterpiece." -- Ali Smith, author of Gliff
Sprache
Verlagsort
Maße
Höhe: 214 mm
Breite: 144 mm
Dicke: 30 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-324-06635-4 (9781324066354)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Linn Ullmann is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Scandinavian literature and the author of seven novels. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and many of her titles have been adapted for the stage. She has received numerous awards, including the Norwegian Gullpennen (Golden Pen) for her journalistic work, and the Amalie Skram Prize, the Dobloug Prize, and the Aschehoug Prize for her collected body of work. Both Girl, 1983 and Unquiet were nominated for Northern Europe's most prestigious literary award, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and were bestsellers throughout Scandinavia. They form part of an ongoing trilogy meditating on memory, rage, and desire. Ullmann's background is in journalism and literary criticism. She teaches creative writing and lives in Oslo with her husband, the writer and poet Niels Fredrik Dahl, and their family. Martin Aitken has translated the works of many Scandinavian writers, among them Helle Helle, Hanne Orstavik, Olga Ravn, and Karl Ove Knausgard. He lives in Denmark.
