Review by Booklist Review
Critically acclaimed Norwegian novelist Ullman (Unquiet, 2019) melds memoir and fiction in this beautiful reflection on memory and desire. An unnamed woman, a writer in midlife, struggles to comprehend a 1983 encounter in Paris--"I remember and forget in glimpses"-- and to parse adolescent longing from abuse. She was 16, discontented, living in New York with her actress mother, wanting to be the "object of another's desire," when a 44-year-old photographer offered her a fashion shoot. Four decades on, the girl within urgently demands to be heard but "unravels" whenever the woman's gaze actually draws near. There was a photo, now lost, showing bare shoulders, dangly earrings. The woman's memories spiral restlessly between past and present, between vivid details like a blue coat, woolly red hat, and knee-high boots, and disturbing "absences"--a "splash of white paint" where a face should be. 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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A woman struggles to write about what she had long thought unwritable in this intense meditation on trauma and art from Ullmann (Unquiet). The narrator, a 55-year-old writer and translator in Oslo, recounts how at 16, while living in New York City, she met a 40-something fashion photographer in the elevator of her apartment building and accepted his invitation to a photo shoot in Paris, despite her mother's objections. Looking back, she cautiously approaches describing what is clearly a traumatic episode, the details of which she gradually comes to terms with ("the never-ending night, a night whose scope, nearly forty years on, I struggle to comprehend"). In her halting attempts to bring order and precision to her "spiral of restlessness, forgetfulness and unfinished stories," she finds inspiration and comfort in confessional writing by Sharon Olds, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Carson, each of whom "were here before me and who've been where I am now." The solemn tone never wavers, which some readers may find stultifying, but the narrator's vivid memories of her youth--colors, impressions, lacerating remarks--culminate in an unflinching description of the fateful encounter with the photographer. The result is a mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (July)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A woman is beset by ghosts. Following the autofictionalUnquiet (2019), evoking the death of her father, filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, award-winning novelist Ullmann meditates on memory, anxiety, and loss in a disquieting tale, gracefully translated from the Norwegian by Aitken. The haunted narrator is 55, with a 16-year-old daughter, obsessed with something that happened to her when she herself was 16, a disaffected high school junior living in New York with her actress mother. By chance, she meets a photographer, K, an urbane 44-year-old who invites her to be photographed in his Paris studio; longing "to be the object, the centre, the focus of another's desire," she convinces her mother to let her go. And so, in January 1983, after hastily checking into a hotel, she finds herself in a "bunker-like" studio among tall, skinny models and lecherous men. K hardly notices her, and when a few girls decide to leave, she goes along--unprepared for a decadent club scene. By the middle of the night, she's alone, not knowing the name of her hotel, lost. The only address she has is K's apartment, where she turns up at 2 a.m. The photograph he finally takes of her is the image that plummets her into the past. But memory is elusive: "The girl I was unravels whenever I draw near." She struggles to distinguish "what happened and whatmay have happened"; she suffers recurring depression; and she is visited by an imaginary sister and the benevolent spirits of writers--Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Emily Dickinson--whose words she translates into Norwegian. Finding "the precise word," she says, helps "to ease the dread." 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
