There are a couple of unavoidable aspects in the life of the writer Linn Ullmann (Oslo, 1966). The first is to be seen as the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, two film legends who made this art a profound and aesthetic form of expression. The second is to have become one of the most singular voices in Scandinavian literature, even more so with the exercise in the archeology of memory that is his autobiographical trilogy, whose second installment, Chica, 1983 (Gatopardo, Les Hores, in Catalan), part of an episode from his adolescence in which sexual desire and abuse are confused. It happened to her at the age of 16: she went to Paris alone, ignoring her mother, who said goodbye to her in New York praying that a storm would cancel her flight. She had met a photographer thirty years older in an elevator who told her he saw her as a model... Once in Paris, they take her from one place to another and she can't remember her name from her hotel. ..
Have you been wanting to untie this Gordian knot for some time or was that trilogy of yours that you started with Los inquietos, about your childhood, what has led you to do so?
That story of when I was 16 years old has always stayed with me, when I went to Paris thinking that I was a sophisticated adult who was going to conquer the world and it was all devastating. I tried to address it in my writing in many ways but without success. Every time she read The Lover she thought that her thing would be to do it as Marguerite Duras. At the age of 20, I imagined it as a sensual story between a young woman and an older man. At 30, that older man didn't seem so good to me anymore. At 40 I thought it was actually a story about a mother and daughter... and at 50 I've seen that it's not just a love story, but a transactional one, part abuse, part exploration. The right thing to do was to focus on the girl and the fact that she was lost and didn't understand what was happening. That bewilderment was both mental and physical location in a city that did not know. She wanted to see what happened, how and why, and how much desire there was in the girl for it to happen.
Is the structure of the novel based on returning over and over again to the same memory to feel capable of revealing something else?
Yes, it is one thing to find the voice and another the structure. And I understood that it was a circular book, with no beginning or end, it goes in circles, which is the emotion you get when you lose yourself. I get very disoriented on the street. And then you start to go around, you go through the same places, but the perspective changes, the light is different, there is another emotion... That's what I do: I don't add value judgments, I just describe what happens.
The episode with A's “greasy” colleague, the lover, is described with the coldness of a police report. Have you ever wondered why he didn't run when he sensed danger?
Yes. And I don't know, and it's with that “I don't know” that I write the novel. The girl doesn't feel any desire for that man, she doesn't have to sit on her knee. Why does the girl do those things? But the good thing is that she watches, she has that power. Although she does not fight or resist, she is aware. She looks at A. while he sleeps, naked, which in the pictorial world tends to be the other way around: an old man watches a naked young woman. That was fun.
Hidden behind initials and pseudonyms to those fashion individuals with whom he came across in the eighties and who today would perhaps go to jail for trafficking young girls...
I don't know, I was already 16 and in France there isn't even an age limit of consent. I know they are criminal acts, but I like it when you don't know if it's really abuse or a flirtation that goes beyond. Is it a game or is it violence? Or both? Is it desire or exploitation? They are both.
Do you see cause-effect between what happened in Paris and any episode of depression of yours that you describe?
I put it together in the novel, but life is more complicated and intricate. The important thing was to portray episodes from a woman's life.
His father, Ingmar Bergman, was 20 years older than his mother, Liv Ullmann. Do you see parallelism? Is the girl looking for the father?
The girl takes it as a compliment when a man notices her in the elevator. She is young, naïve and doesn't think he could be interested beyond flirting. However, once upstairs, she takes off her clothes and gets into her bed, no one forces her. At 16 desire takes you, surpasses you. I don't want to present her as a victim because it's her body, exploring and exploiting.
And did he want to be like his mother?
In these two books I explore desire but also beauty. My mother in 1983 was tremendously beautiful. And that's what I love to write about because beauty is a magnificent place to enter. I remember when I was a child someone wrote an article on Scenes from a Marriage wondering how it was possible for the man to leave Marianne being so pretty. He said that he left the cinema in love, seeing how other men and women left as dizzy, drunk from my mother's beauty. I don't know if he said it like that but it's how I remember it in New York. Imagine what it's like growing up surrounded by this power of your mother's beauty… Logically, when a man in an elevator sees me and wants to take me to Paris I think: of course yes, that's beauty! But I've never been an actress, and as a model I was terrible. I have the mind of a writer and perhaps of a dancer, of someone who looks more than someone who is looked at. I hate being photographed.
Your mother will have read the book...
We never talk about what happened in Paris. During the pandemic, she was isolated in the US and we were talking on the phone. In basic things like the shopping list, which she wrote, I ordered online and it arrived at her door, we found a beautiful communication. She draws and on the list she drew pictures, like two girls sitting on a fence. A way to talk a little about the things that happened to us in life. Being sexually manipulated happens to most girls. And to the mothers. They are intergenerational traumas.
