Unquiet

by Linn Ullmann

Overview

“Didionesque.” —New York Times Book Review

A heartbreaking and darkly funny portrait of the intricacies of family life, Unquiet is an elegy of memory and loss, identity and art, growing up and growing old.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393609950
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/25/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	387
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Linn Ullmann is one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Scandinavian literature and the author of seven novels. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and many of her titles have been adapted for the stage. She has received numerous awards, including the Norwegian Gullpennen (Golden Pen) for her journalistic work, and the Amalie Skram Prize, the Dobloug Prize, and the Aschehoug Prize for her collected body of work. Both Girl, 1983 and Unquiet were nominated for Northern Europe’s most prestigious literary award, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, and were bestsellers throughout Scandinavia. They form part of an ongoing trilogy meditating on memory, rage, and desire. Ullmann’s background is in journalism and literary criticism. She teaches creative writing and lives in Oslo with her husband, the writer and poet Niels Fredrik Dahl, and their family.

Editorial Reviews

…the unfulfilled longing for clarity and accountability from parents who are also artists…is one of the book's most powerful guiding emotions…Ullmann's prose…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] 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…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…

The New York Times Book Review - A. O. Scott

"Gracefully exquisite, sharply funny, and richly poignant... Ullmann's homage to family, art, beauty, and love is resplendently vital, and enchantingly evocative."

Booklist

"Precise, lean, cadenced sentences... [Unquiet] believably conveys the feeling—dreadful, delightful—of a child's point of view. The clarity and lack of fetter is characteristic of Ullmann's way of seeing the world in prose. "

New York Times Magazine - Wyatt Mason

"Unquiet is a wonderfully absorbing and moving family story told with a directness, naturalness, and grace that can only result from Linn Ullmann’s close attention to the eloquent details of day-to-day life, her honest embrace of herself and the people close to her, and a keen sensitivity to language and the high demands of good writing."

Lydia Davis

"I’ve long admired Linn Ullmann’s fiction, and Unquiet is her masterpiece. Based on her upbringing as the child of two great artists, it is the portrait of complex loves; of a youth divided and inspired by diametrically opposed creative influences; and of the ravages of age. Calm yet fierce, exquisitely rendered, this novel imprints itself indelibly—as if you, too, had been there."

Claire Messud

"Ullmann moves deftly between narrative selves over time—from the little girl’s raw bewilderments to the adult’s reflective meditations. Unquiet is a beautiful book about the emotion and the art of memory."

Siri Hustvedt

"[An] exquisite and warm novel... Among Norway’s contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence. Here she blasts her story into fragments and puts it back together, piece by piece, with the artistry of someone who has always secretly known the broken things are most beautiful."

LitHub

"With singular imagination and generosity, Linn Ullmann breaks new ground in the art of memory, transporting us into the sources of magic in her life with her enchanting parents."

Honor Moore

"Ullmann’s prose... 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."

New York Times Book Review

"But even without knowing her parents were world-renowned, Unquiet would resonate powerfully because many of the issues it explores are common to parent-child relationships.… It’s a high-wire act few writers have performed with such grace."

Hyperallergic - Dmitry Samarov

"This magnificent, elegant work is pure tour de force. It’s part elegy, part elucidation of family love and family mystery, it’s funny, wry, dry, almost untakeably moving, and all of this is held steady in the form by Linn Ullmann’s refusal to swerve from the true, by her understanding of the combined human weakness and human marvelousness in all of us, and above all by her clear eye. It is a wonderful book, unputdownable, one that taps into the sheer electric current between the fictions and the truths that make our life stories. It’s one of the best things I’ve read in a long, long time."

Ali Smith

"Linn Ullmann has written something of beauty and solace and truth. I don’t know how she managed to sail across such dangerous waters—dangerous artistically as well as personally—without capsizing or making a mistake, but it is a tremendous accomplishment. Funny, graceful, interesting, modest, and most of all a work of the highest moral competence."

Rachel Cusk

"A haunting meditation on the shifting moods between women and men over a lifetime of making art; the pains and pleasures of attachment, the boiling emotions of girlhood, the conflicts of motherhood, and the enchantment of a secluded home on the edge of a stormy sea, in which a famous father writes his dreams on the bedside table. I could not put it down."

Deborah Levy

"[An] exquisite and warm novel.… Among Norway’s contemporary writers, Ullmann might be the finest sentence by sentence."

LitHub - John Freeman