Review: Unquiet is a portrait of isolation and loneliness
Norwegian author Linn Ullmann is a feminist in a manner which would have been unlikely in her parents’ generation. Picture: Francois Guillot/AFP via Getty Images
SOME therapists have, in their practice rooms, a tray of sand and a collection of stones and shells. Clients, if willing, may choose objects to represent the significant people in their lives. They can then place them on the sand to indicate relationships, and insights emerge from these choices. To some extent Linn Ullmann’s, Unquiet, is a literary version of this exercise.
Ullmann identifies Unquiet as a novel and yet it is clearly a memoir, if an unusual one. Although she doesn’t mention the names of her parents, preferring to call them, ‘the father’ and ‘the mother’ and herself ‘the girl’ we discover that her mother is the actress Liv Ullmann, sometime lover of Ingmar Bergman. It would be facile to state that the structure of the text resembles one of Bergman’s existentialist films but this idea does have some communicative mileage.
