Vivid ... Girl, 1983 is...deft in its experiments, subverting conventional ideas about fiction’s use of the truth ... Ullmann has not just written an autobiographical novel; she has suggested that every autobiography might be a novel in the first place ... Both distinctly personal and universally true.
[Ullmann] brings such precision and honesty to the telling, the book transcends the familiar #MeToo outline ... Ullmann captures the splintered, slippery nature of memory itself ... Spare, elliptical ... Such equivocalness and lack of resolution in Girl, 1983...will frustrate some readers ... Vivid ... Strangely, contradictorily, reassuring.
No precision in Girl, 1983. The book is endlessly recursive, as shapeless as water. It pools, eddies, evaporates ... At times I wondered if this was simply a bad book. But each time that doubt crept in, a diamond of a sentence...would catch me on its edge ... Though the project may be more useful to the writer than to the reader, she has nonetheless achieved something rare: She has created a reading experience as disorienting as one’s own ability to forget, capturing the way certain lapses of memory fuzz over into a white glare.
Girl, 1983 powerfully transmits the feelings of shame and guilt that are deflected on to the innocent victim ... Martin Aitken’s translation conveys a spare style in which rage and fear are subsumed into a simple need to confront.
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 ... Painfully powerful.
A disquieting tale, gracefully translated from the Norwegian by Aitken ... In precise, lyrical prose, Ullmann creates a captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself ... An engrossing, intimate narrative.
Intense ... The solemn tone never wavers, which some readers may find stultifying, but the narrator’s vivid memories of her youth...culminate in an unflinching description of the fateful encounter with the photographer. The result is a mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution.
