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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.
On a winter's night in 1983, a 16-year-old girl is lost on the streets of Paris. She's been in the city for less than 24 hours and can't remember the name of her hotel; she's alone and scared. All she has in her pocket is the address of "K," the forty-something fashion photographer who's lured her to the French capital with a promise to get her picture in Vogue. She wants to go home—back to New York, back to her mother, who pleaded with her not to come. But it's after midnight and snow is piling up on the sidewalk: what other choice does she have? She makes her way to K's place, suspecting what might be in store.
A reader can't be sure how much of this actually happened to Linn Ullmann, author of the gut-wrenching and excellent Girl, 1983. The book is categorized as fiction, and a disclaimer stresses that "none [of it] should be understood as a literal depiction of any person, event, or incident," but it has been widely regarded as being autobiographical. The daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman, two of the most important European cultural figures of the 20th century (see Beyond the Book), Linn Ullmann has clearly learned from having "parents [who] have made a point of turning their lives into stories," as she remarks in Unquiet, her previous novel. Ullmann's fiction mines the same depths of interior life as that of Annie Ernaux and fellow Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, taking personal experience and crafting from it a work that operates in the shadow space between the real and the imagined. The result is masterful: a book teeming with ghosts, steeped in trauma, with the knock-out power of eyewitness testimony.
Mostly split between the events in Paris and the crushing depression they lead to 40 years later, the narrative outline of Girl, 1983 is sadly familiar in the post-MeToo age. Ullmann's narrator is "discovered" in an elevator in New York; at K's urging, she skips school to get on a plane and meet him in Paris for a shoot. Reading her account of the world she finds there, it's astounding that it could ever pass itself off as one of romance and glamour. The fashion scene seems populated by little more than middle-aged predators and the enablers who know how to look the other way; the only goal of its leading "artists" is ensuring that they have a steady supply of schoolgirls to belittle, abuse, and ply with "blue drinks and cocaine." It's a pitiless world, where the natural competition between would-be models leaves no room for even a hint of sorority. "Stupid little girl," one of the narrator's new Parisian "friends" tells her after she's molested on a dancefloor by two strangers, "if you can't handle people touching you, you shouldn't be here."
It's phrases like this that seem to haunt Ullmann, resurfacing again and again in the narrative like the pain from an old wound. Hers is a fragmented and staccato style, flitting from past to present, shuddering around the black hole that is her brief encounter with K. How else to approach a memory so grotesque? When it can't be avoided any longer, however, she doesn't shy away, describing it with almost unbearable clarity—tangled in his sheets, she's nothing but a "big, motionless child who's not reciprocating." These sobering descriptions dispel once and for all the obscene romantic fantasy the photographer has dreamt up for the pair.
Girl, 1983 is the second installment of what Ullmann plans to be a trilogy "meditating on memory, rage and desire," an organizing principal which is more emotional than chronological. The first volume, Unquiet, focused on her relationship with her father as he neared death; in its second, the world-famous director is all but absent. But whatever the subject, any future work with the same depth and intensity can only be good news.
Reviewed by Alex Russell
Ali Smith, author of Gliff
Rachel Cusk, author of Parade
In Girl, 1983, Linn Ullmann uses the tools of fiction to dissect a teenaged narrator's traumatic encounter with an older man. That narrator's biography has numerous parallels to Ullmann's own, including a turbulent adolescence divided among New York, Norway, and Sweden—the result of being the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and director Ingmar Bergman, two of the most important European cultural figures of the 20th century.
The elder Ullmann and Bergman met in 1965, when she was in her mid-20s and he was in his mid-40s. Both were married at the time; Bergman had in fact been married four times already and had seven children. The director was by this point one of Europe's foremost filmmakers, having achieved international success in the late 1950s with avant-garde works such as The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Ullmann had established herself as a stage actress but was still a relative unknown when Bergman cast her in Persona (opposite his former lover, Bibi Andersson). The film was quickly hailed a masterpiece, and it launched an intense personal and professional relationship that was to last decades.
Not long after the two met, Ullmann left her husband and moved to Fårö, the remote island in the Baltic where Bergman had decided to build his home after using it as the location for Through a Glass Darkly in 1961. The couple quickly had a daughter (Linn, the author of Girl, 1983), and at first life on the island was idyllic: Ullmann has described her first year there as like "living in soft walls of sunlight, desire and happiness." The honeymoon wasn't to last, however, and the island of a few hundred people came to resemble something of a prison for Ullmann. Bergman was notoriously possessive, with a jealousy that Ullmann has described as "violent and without boundaries." He would only allow her to meet others on a Wednesday, and she remembers how, on her return, she would find him standing watch and waiting for her.
The intensity of the relationship didn't bode well for its longevity, and it ended messily in the early 1970s as a result of one of the director's infidelities. However, out of their romantic breakup, the pair salvaged what came to be an extremely fruitful creative partnership. Acclaimed films Face to Face and Autumn Sonata earned both of them Academy Award nominations in the 1970s, and they continued collaborating until Bergman retired from directing in 1982. (Bergman wrote his final film, Fanny and Alexander, with Ullmann in mind, and the actress has spoken of her regret at turning down the lead role. It would go on to win four Oscars.)
Bergman died in 2007, on his island home of Fårö. He left behind a celebrated artistic legacy, but a more complicated personal one. As their daughter Linn writes in Unquiet, the first book in her current trilogy, "I was his child and her child, but never their child, it was never us three." Her mother has spoken of how upset she first was at her daughter's "very selective … memories of her childhood"—but the impact of Linn's unstable early years is undeniable when reading her work. Yet in spite of their turbulent relationship, Ullmann and Bergman created enduring landmarks in the history of film; and as time passes, Ullmann's contribution to that legacy is being better appreciated. As John Lithgow said when she was finally awarded an Oscar in 2022, "Ingmar is a genius who made all these movies, but the question is, 'What would he have been without Liv?'"
Liv Ullmann with daughter Linn, 1966
Photo by Rigmor Dahl Delphin (1908-1993), courtesy of Oslo Museum
Filed under People, Eras & Events
By Alex Russell
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