There are many books that depict the permutations of growing older

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The best books that celebrate old age

Unquiet

'Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters' RACHEL CUSK 
 
He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, by the actress he directed and once loved. Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. 
 
Now that she's grown up - a writer, with children of her own - and he's in his eighties, they envision writing a book together, about old age, language, memory and loss. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record. 
 
But it's winter now and old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the father is gone, only memories, images and words -- both remembered and recorded - remain. And from these the daughter begins to write her own story, in the pages which become this book. 
 
Heart-breaking and spell-binding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.

Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don't know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters

This magnificent, elegant work is pure tour de force... one of the best things I've read in a long, long time

[An] exquisite and warm novel ... Among Norway's contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence

Unquiet is a wonderfully absorbing and moving family story told with a directness, naturalness, and grace that can only result from Linn Ullmann's close attention to the eloquent details of day-to-day life, her honest embrace of herself and the people close to her, and a keen sensitivity to language and the high demands of good writing

I've long admired Linn Ullmann's fiction, and Unquiet is her masterpiece. Based on her upbringing as the child of two great artists, it is the portrait of complex loves; of a youth divided and inspired by diametrically opposed creative influences; and of the ravages of age. Calm yet fierce, exquisitely rendered, this novel imprints itself indelibly?as if you, too, had been there

Ullmann navigates the dangerous and fissile territory... with great power. I am in awe

Effortlessly lucid, full of grace and restraint

A powerful and unsettling hybrid of memoir, fiction and meditation ... The work of a lifetime

Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visited her father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. 
 
Years later, when she is grown with children of her own and he's in his eighties, they plan to write a book together. It will be about age and time, language and memory. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record. But old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the man is gone, only memories - both remembered and recorded - remain. 
 
Heart-breaking and spellbinding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.

Linn Ullmann

Martin Aitken

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 kindred 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

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

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

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

Girl, 1983 powerfully transmits the feelings of shame and guilt that are deflected on the innocent victim

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

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

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

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

It reminded me of Renata Adler, Lena Andersson, Annie Ernaux. I loved it

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

The 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

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 begins to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before and looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. 
 
Set in Oslo, New York and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion – a raw and haunting exposure of beauty and forgetting, desire and shame, power and powerlessness.

Linn Ullmann

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The best books that celebrate old age

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