Girl, 1983

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

Roxana Robinson

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

Rachel Cusk

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

Kirkus

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 kindered 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

Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

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

Washington Post

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

Atlantic

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

Los Angeles Review of Books