Linn Ullmann, the girl of dad and mom, but not both

She, the girl who stars ‘The Restless’ (Gatopardo / Les Hores), writer’s latest novel Linn Ulmann, he loved his parents unreservedly. “One was the night and the other, the day & rdquor ;, she writes. He loved both equally although “where one began, the other ended… I was his child and hers. But I was never the girl of the two & rdquor ;. To Ullmann, one of the most respected authors in the Norwegian language –podium that she shares with Karl Ove Knausgard-, Her charismatic affiliation does not bother her, but she is the daughter of Liv Ullmann, one of the great actresses of European cinema, and the filmmaker Ingmar Bergmann become your business card. You do not need it and it also distorts the perception that you may have of your work. Delicate multi-award winning author with concerns that equate her to writers who are currently opening a unique path in literature, such as Rachel Cusk or Deborah Levy, Ullmann, with seven published novels, has decided to start a novelistic trilogy with a clear autobiographical background that is pure fragmentary literature and poetic. Interviewing her is not an easy task, even if the forms are most friendly, because she resists like an eel to establish that the unnamed characters in the work are the wonderful actress that is her mother and that enormous director secluded on the Swedish island of Faro who was his father.

when words fail

The novel evokes the summers that the girl (Linn Ullmann?), ninth daughter that a filmmaker (Ingmar Bergman?) had with different women, spent with her father and the years of his decline when the creator began to lack the memories and words Father and daughter, director and writer, then approached the idea of ​​a possible book of conversations of which only a few tapes remained at the death of the director. “My father and I discussed writing a book about getting older. He was already beginning to show signs of physical and mental aging, we talked about it, we recorded the conversations, but my father’s deterioration meant that we had to create a new language between us. I couldn’t ask him anything he wanted to ask him and he didn’t answer anything he wanted to answer, I felt that job as a total failure & rdquor ;. But it wasn’t. That ended up becoming the seed for ‘Los inquietos’, which is not exactly a novel about a great father. “I wanted to write a novel about family ties and about growing up, getting older and looking back. It is also a story about failure, about these wonderful projects that end up falling apart. Deep down, I feel that the fragility of vulnerability appears in all my books.

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The author of the archetypes that were established at the time of her parents feels very far away. “The father of the novel is an old-fashioned macho and a brilliant mind at the same time. The mother is a very beautiful woman. The father is the one who looks and the mother, the object of his gaze. The girl is between the two and her feeling is that she cannot identify with either of them & rdquor ;. Times have changed and today Linn Ullmann’s family life has nothing to do with that: “My husband is a writer and we are 50% responsible for housework. And I would say that my children have evolved much more if possible in this field. My youngest daughter who just turned 18 – I still can’t believe it – is an extraordinary young woman who has a very different understanding of gender and gender fluidity than I do.” Ullmann teaches writing classes at the university and one of the first things she tells her students is to discard this idea of ​​the genius with a big hat. “I tell them that if they want to write, the first thing they have to do is take off that hat because writing is trying to say something concrete in the simplest and most precise way.”