Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! Nordic Book Club meets monthly via Zoom to discuss contemporary literature in translation. On October 7, we’ll be discussing the novel Girl, 1983 by Norwegian author Linn Ullman.

Described as “a mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution” by Publishers Weekly, Girl, 1983 delves into Ullman’s unflinching recount of a fateful encounter nearly 40 years on: one between her 16-year-old self and a 40-something fashion photographer in the elevator of her apartment building in New York City. She accepts 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 untangles through the confessional writings of women who she finds share her experience. Set in Oslo, New York, and Paris, Girl, 1983 is a genre-defying and bravura quest through layers of memory and oblivion. As in her landmark previous work, Unquiet, Linn Ullmann’s narrator continues to probe the elegiac sway of memory as she looks for ways to disclose a long-guarded secret. A delineation of time and place over the course of a life, this remarkable novel insistently crisscrosses the path of a wayward sixteen-year-old girl lost in Paris.