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Summary
Summary
He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, the youngest of nine children. Every summer, since she was a little girl, she visits him at his beloved stony house surrounded by woods, poppies, and the Baltic sea. Now that she's grown up and he's in his late eighties, he envisions a book about old age. He worries that he's losing his language, his memory, his mind. Growing old is hard work, he says. They will write it together. She will ask the questions. He will answer them.
When she finally comes to the island, bringing her tape recorder with her, old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen.
Unquiet follows the narrator as she unearths these taped conversations seven years later. Swept into memory, she reimagines the story of a father, a mother, and a girl--a child who can't wait to grow up and parents who would rather be children.
A heartbreaking and darkly funny depiction of the intricacies of family, Unquiet is an elegy of memory and loss, identity and art, growing up and growing old. Linn Ullmann nimbly blends memoir and fiction in her most inventive novel yet, weaving a luminous meditation on language, mourning, and the many narratives that make up a life.
Author Notes
Linn Ullmann is the author of six award-winning, critically acclaimed novels, and her work has been published in more than thirty languages. Her previous novel, The Cold Song, was a New York Times Notable Book. Unquiet has received multiple awards and spent more than a year on top of the of Scandinavian bestseller lists. In 2017, Ullmann was awarded the Dobloug Prize from the Swedish Academy for her body of work. She lives in Oslo with her husband and daughter.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ullmann's spellbinding novel (after The Cold Song) is a fragmentary portrait of a place and time, and a testament to the legacies of those she mourns. Blending memoir and literary fiction, this book presents revelatory, frank depictions of the author's relationship to her father, legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, and of his relationship to the author's mother, Liv Ullmann, an actress and filmmaker often considered to be his greatest inspiration. Based originally on a brief series of taped conversations between Ullmann and her father just before his death, Ullmann confronts the nature of growing old while subtly studying her own childhood and middle age through the lens of her father's decline. She reminisces on her often idyllic and tumultuous youth, studying stacks of love letters between her parents, and considering the situations that must have brought the life of her family to where it is. Some of Ullmann's best passages are about her charming, confounding mother: "Mamma's rules for good parenting: 1. Children must drink milk. 2. Children must live near trees." Echoing Duras's The Lover in its blurring of the real and the imagined as well as in its obsessive attention to detail, this is a striking book about the enduring love between parents and children, and the fierce attachments that bind them even after death. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Ullmann's lithe sixth novel (following The Cold Song, 2014) flickers like film threaded through a projector, shifting between dark and light, past and present, autobiography and fiction. Like the author, who is the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, the book's self-deprecating narrator is the daughter of a legendary Swedish director and the much-younger woman who starred in some of his most famous films. Her father has nine children with five women. She is the youngest, and her parents, who never married, weren't together long. She now looks back on a jaggedly disjointed childhood briefly redeemed by precious summer weeks with her father in his orderly home on a spare Swedish island. Papa had been so punctual and disciplined that the eventual effects of age's cruel diminishments on him disorient everyone. The narrator manages to record six late-life interviews with him, and brief excerpts appear within her gracefully exquisite, sharply funny, and richly poignant reminiscences. In order to write about real people, Ullmann's stand-in observes, . . . it is necessary to make them fictional. I believe this is the only way of breathing life into them. Ullmann's homage to family, art, beauty, and love is resplendently vital, and enchantingly evocative.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LAST YEAR MARKED both the 80 th birthday of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the centenary of Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who directed her in 10 films and was her lover for a few years in the late 1960s. The anniversaries were observed in the usual ways: a celebration of Ullmann at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; a Criterion Collection boxed set of Bergman's work; tributes from colleagues, critics and Scandiphiles. Together and apart, Ullmann and Bergman (who died in 2007) represented a particular kind of late-20th-century cultural charisma, an aesthetic ideal that remains seductive in its blend of high seriousness and sensuality. It's hard to know whether to count the American publication of "Unquiet," Linn Ullmann's new novel, as a belated addition to the double birthday festivities. Ullmann, who lives in Oslo and is the author of five previous novels, is Liv Ullmann's only child and was Bergman's ninth. While neither the narrator of "Unquiet" nor her parents are named, the book feels closer to memoir than fiction, and not only because of the obvious real-world parallels. "The mother" is an up-and-coming actress in her 20s when she gets involved with "the father," an eminent auteur more than 20 years her senior. They are together for a while (in between his fourth and fifth marriages) and after their separation "the girl" (as their daughter sometimes calls herself when she lets go of the first person) spends summers with her half siblings at her father's compound on the island of Faro. Memories of those sojourns, and of the girl's more unsettled life with her mother in Scandinavia and the United States, pass through the scrim of her adult consciousness in an order that isn't linear but doesn't feel random either. For readers anticipating a book-length gossip-column blind item - or a score-settling peek into the intimate lives of famous people - "Unquiet" may be disappointing. The real-life celebrity of the almost-fictional characters, including Linn Ullmann herself, several of whose books have been international best sellers, is both a lure and a distraction. The temptation to check Ullmann's recollections against other sources - Liv Ullmann's memoirs, "Changing" and "Choices"; the wealth of critical and biographical writing on Bergman; the tele vision interviews scattered across YouTtibe - may be especially strong given the elusiveness of the text. But the impulse should be resisted, as should the slightly more elevated (or at least less prurient) urge to use the book as an interpretive skeleton key to unlock the meaning of difficult films. The enigmas of "Persona" and the emotional shadings of "Scenes From a Marriage" are unlikely to be illuminated by any new revelations about their maker and star. As it happens, the frustration of precisely such a desire - the unfulfilled longing for clarity and accountability from parents who are also artists - is one of the book's most powerful guiding emotions. Slipping toward middle age as her father moves through his 80s, the daughter, now a successful writer, twice-married with children of her own, records a series of conversations with him. The idea is that their talks will be the basis of a book, a cross-generational collaboration on the subject of aging: "He said that things went missing. He said that the words disappeared. If he were younger he would have written a book about growing old. But now that he was old, he wasn't up to it. He no longer had the vigor of a younger man. This line of thinking prompted one of us, I don't remember who, to come up with the idea of writing a book together. I would ask the questions, he would answer them, I would transcribe the conversations, and finally we would sit down together and edit the material. Once the book was out, we would take the jeep and go on a book tour." The rueful humor of the last sentence is typical of Ullmann's prose, which is plain, succinct and declarative, with currents of intensity flowing beneath the placid surface. The effect, in Thilo Reinhard's graceful English translation, is almost Didionesque, as the willed, witty detachment of the narrator's voice at once conceals and emphasizes the rawness of her emotions. "unquiet" can be read as a grief memoir in the tradition of Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," a meditation on the way loss manifests itself in the life of the bereaved. By the time the father-daughter book project gets underway in earnest, it's too late. The father is slipping away, and then he's gone. "We made the recordings in May, he died at the end of July at 4 o'clock in the morning." There will be no book, no tour in the jeep, and the tapes themselves - or rather the miniature recorder with its digital files - will drop out of sight for seven years. Its rediscovery brings back the father's ghost, but the transcripts that Ullmann reproduces also reveal the extent to which he was already absent: "SHE: Can you tell me about Mamma? "HE: I have been thinking about Beethoven and how he goes right at you. Right at your feelings...." The narrator's recollections confirm the impression of a man whose commitments to art, eros and self-exploration dictate a certain remoteness from his children. There were a lot of them - nine in all, with six different women - and he organized life on his island to defend its routines against their unruly energies. The women came and went. Which is not to say that her father was cold or cruel, but that the intimacies his daughter managed to find with him were built on a foundation of estrangement. The narrator's mother is a different story - more bluntly judged by her child and also a more vivid and complex presence in the book. She leaves the girl in the care of her own mother and, later, a succession of babysitters as she pursues her stage and screen career on two continents. The girl is envious of her mother's beauty and resentful of her capriciousness, emphasizing without ever quite acknowledging the genderbased double standard that colors her feelings. The father is just exercising the prerogatives granted to male artists, while the mother's creative ambitions are seen as a kind of betrayal. A father who is mostly elsewhere is a fact of life; a mother who goes away is a kind of monster. "I was his child and her child, but not their child," Ullmann writes, "it was never us three." Her novel is a collagelike group portrait of a family splintered from the start, an attempt to isolate the mother, the father and the daughter and plot their points of intersection. "Plot" may not be the right word, though the fragmentary structure generates its own kind of suspense. There is a lot of information amid the impressionistic evocations of mood and place - about the narrator's marriages and love affairs (including a teenage liaison with a much older man); about the mother's love life; about the father's serial monogamy. These are not threads so much as needles, jabbing the reader to a heightened state of attention and then slipping away. Ullmann's previous novel, "The Cold Song," used similar techniques to turn a crime story into a meditation on cause, effect and responsibility. "Unquiet" is, well, quieter, and also more chaotic, finding drama and pathos in its own search for an adequate form and turning its failures into something fascinating and rich. In the process, it creates - or perhaps discovers - two characters who seem stranger, sadder and more real than the actress and the filmmaker we might have thought we knew: "I'm trying to understand something about love here, and about my parents, and why solitude played such a significant role in their lives, and why they, more than anything in the whole world, were so afraid of being abandoned." 'Unquiet' can be read as a meditation on the way loss is manifest in the life of the bereaved. H. O. SCOTT, co-chief film critic at The Times, is the author of "Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth."
Kirkus Review
A brilliant meditation on time, mortality, and the limits of memory.Ullmann is a journalist, a literary critic, and the author of several novelsmost recently The Cold Song (2014). She is also the daughter of the actor Liv Ullmann and the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. This memoir in the shape of a novelor novel based on memoirbegan as a series of conversations the writer had with her father shortly before he died. While much of the book is devoted to her early lifewhen her father was fit and commandinga sense of loss permeates the narrative. Ullmann recounts the precise instant when it became clear that the man she knew was gone: The studiously punctual Bergman is late to meet her for a movie showing, a daily ritual that has been part of his life for decades. Ullmann is shocked in the moment, but it's only in retrospect that she recognizes it for what it is. The recordings Ullmann madewhich appear in transcript form throughout the bookfunction more as talismans than as documentary evidence of the man her father was. The sound quality is poor. The conversation is halting, and there are gaps in Bergman's memory. What Ullmann wants to capture is already in the process of disappearing. So, she's left with her own memories. Certainly, her memories are singular. Bergman had multiple wives and mistresses and many, many children and grandchildren, all of whom come and go on the isolated island where the director has made his home. Ullmann's situation is exceptional, but the emotional experiences she describes are poignant and accessible. When she recounts scenes from her childhood, she sometimes speaks in the first person and she sometimes calls herself "the girl," underscoring the sense in which past selves are constructions we create in the present. And, of course, her memories of her father as a younger man may be vivid, but they are no more reliable than those garbled digital recordings of her father in his decline. Ullmann's prose is elegant (her translator deserves some credit for this), sharp, and occasionally funny. But the mood of this work as a whole is elegiac. "Can I," she asks, "mourn people who are still alive?"Gorgeous and heartbreaking. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A daughter assembles the pieces of her father's long life, and in doing so gathers some of the pieces of her own life as well. In this case, her parents are the acclaimed actress Liv Ullman and the legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The author meets with her father as he nears the end of his days in a treasured spot near the Baltic Sea, where she records their conversations, until it finally becomes apparent that his memory is failing. A few years after his passing, she creates a story, part memoir and part fiction, that features their private talks interspersed with her own charming, clear-eyed memories as a young girl fortunate to enjoy a way of life that was at once simple yet steeped in culture. VERDICT To examine the soul of Ingmar Bergman, a man so private and so iconic, requires much deconstruction and reconstruction, not unlike the careful editing of a film. Ullman succeeds on every level, blending time, memory, and emotion into a fascinating and intimate portrait that easily evokes the universal sense of love and loss. Highly recommended.-Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
