Book Review of Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann ( trans Martin Aitken)
Name of Book: Girl, 1983Author: Linn Ullmann (trans Martin Aitken)
ISBN: 9781324066354
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Type of book: 1983, New York, Paris, 1980s to 2020s, counselling, winter, seasons, lost in language, colors, modeling, lost innocence
Year it was published: 2025 (2021)
Summary:
Called a “masterpiece” (Ali Smith), this stunning novel explores desire and anxiety, beauty and youth, memory and power.
Paris, a winter’s night in 1983. The girl 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 bravura quest through layers of oblivion that probes 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, stark, and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.
Main character is the sixteen year old girl, an unnamed narrator who sought fame but paid the price. She is from Scandinavia and lives in New York with her mother. However, one day she catches a photographer's eye and thus begins the story of bildungsroman and lost innocence. She often tiptoe a lot during the book, having the reader go on wild goose chases, at the same time the prose and revelations become less and less shocking as story goes on. There is also the girls mother who acts more as a sister than a mother and who is afraid of exerting her own authority.
Theme:
Memory and experiences create strength and fragility
Plot:
The story is in first person narrative from the girls point of view, and yes the time jumps around a lot, going from early 1980s to modern times often going on tangents and exploring the miniscule details surrounding the story. Best way I imagine it is that a dance is going on and there is a climactic scene approaching, but the narrator keeps pausing, focusing on life or movie before the dancing scene or after, or else the author rewinds the scene to watch it again. The story is divided into three parts and are named after colors: Blue, Red and White, which I suspect has to do with either seasons or colors of the clothes she is wearing, although one would explore the meaning of colors as it relates to Scandinavian culture?
Author Information:
(From goodreads)
Linn Ullmann is the daughter of actress, author and director Liv Ullmann and director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman.
She is a graduate of New York University, where she studied English literature. She returned to Norway in 1990 to pursue a career in journalism.
Her first novel Before You Sleep was published in 1998. Her second novel, Stella Descending (2001) received glowing reviews. Her third novel Grace was published in 2002 and won the prominent literary award “The reader’s prize” in Norway and was named one of the ten best novels of that year by the prestigious Danish newspaper Weekendavisen.
In 2007, Grace was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK. That same year, Ullmann was awarded the prestigeous Norwegian Amalie Skram prize.
Her fourth novel, A Blessed Child, was published in the fall of 2005, and was shortlisted for the Brage Price, one of Norway's most prestigious literary awards. Currently she is working as a journalist and a regular columnist in Norway’s leading newspaper Aftenposten.
When I was younger, two of my favorite books were North China Lover by Marguerite Duras and The Foreign Student by Susan Choi. The experience of reading Girl 1983 is going back to my girlhood years, of seeing potential and dreams that were not tainted by life. This definitely needs a re read because it's impossible to capture it's spirit and meaning within one time exploration.
This was given for review
5 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)
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