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 begin to unravel, the grown woman seeks to comprehend the young girl of before.
Vivid ... Girl, 1983 is still more 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.
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.
