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In the depths of winter, a thin girl — barely 16 — flies alone from New York to Paris. A feted fashion photographer she met in Manhattan wants to shoot her. He pursues “the untouched, the unblemished, the unspoiled look”, and works for French Vogue. “That can change your life, okay?” he tells her, just so long as she stops acting like “an ungrateful little bitch”.
Lost, in a dozen ways, the jet-lagged teen endures sneers and gropes at a Paris fashionistas’ club. In the small hours, an unwitting stranger leads her to “K” the photographer’s apartment. So begins a “never-ending night”, which becomes several. Memory and reverie blur. As do choice and coercion. She wants; she doesn’t. She is just 16; K is 45. Four decades later, that trip still “assumes the character of water”.
How does an event — especially a life-altering event — become a shaped narrative, rather than a “splash of untranslatable white paint”? 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. 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.
In this novel, a journalist texts the narrator to talk “about what’s real and what’s made up in your latest book”. That question Ullmann can hardly avoid. She grew up as the daughter of two of Scandinavia’s most famous people: the Norwegian actor Liv Ullmann, and the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. If her fictions transcend the raw stuff of autobiography, they never deny the soil from which they spring. Unquiet, Ullmann’s previous novel, drew powerfully on Bergman’s final years in his Baltic island home. In Girl, 1983, endnotes explain that lines rehearsed by the girl and mother appear in Bergman’s film Face to Face; the quotes from her father’s diaries derive from Bergman’s journals.
Readers can’t help but think about the status of the events recounted in Girl, 1983. As does its narrator: from the becalmed solitude of pandemic-hit Oslo, she tries to recapture what really happened to that spindly teenager in Paris. “The girl runs through me” still. Yet she “unravels whenever I draw near”.
Although the word “trauma” nowhere appears, fragments of the ordeal with K thread through the narrator’s spells of depression in her fifties. Her family — her now-frail mother in Massachusetts, her daughter, husband and a beloved ageing dog in Oslo — appear “on the other side of an invisible wall”. A “secret sister” keeps company with her: this invisible sharer might help to calm the unquiet past.
As for K, and what he and his fashion cronies perpetrated, “I remember and forget in glimpses”. No likely reader will need a primer on the predatory, squalid and abusive Paris fashion milieu of that era. Cursory internet research even turns up plausible real-life counterparts for figures here. But Ullmann is a novelist, and Girl, 1983 more than a #MeToo exposé of agency and studio sleazebags.
The happenings it seeks to recover “are made up mostly of forgetting, just as the body is composed mostly of water”. In Ullmann’s hands, memory becomes liquid. “The idea of causality” dissolves, and “an arbitrary selection of moments” refuses to solidify into a “chain of events”. This past in flux leaves fear in its wake. What might quell that fear? The narrator’s bond with Mamma, “so steeped in love and forgetting”; the “secret sister”, who goads but cherishes her; the old dog, whose slurping at his water-bowl is “the most beautiful sound I know” — and the writers from Duras to Woolf, those “benevolent ghosts” whose words “tell us we’re not alone”.
Ullmann crafts her own words with unflagging care. Martin Aitken finds a flexible English idiom, terse but lyrical, for this Norwegian novel about the task of translating pain, shame and dread into a language that may heal. Except, that is, for the dog lapping at his bowl. He remains “completely untranslatable”.
Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann, translated by Martin Aitken Hamish Hamilton, £18.99, 268 pages
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