Dive into the best literary fiction out now; GIRL, 1983 by Linn Ullmann, THE DIRECTOR by
GIRL, 1983 by Linn Ullmann (Hamish Hamilton £18.99, 272pp)
LINN Ullmann comes from impressive stock: she’s the daughter of Liv Ullmann and the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, and she wrote beautifully about both in her 2015 memoir Unquiet. She writes more directly about herself in this novelised work of memory, which pivots on an encounter between a 16-year-old girl (a barely disguised Ullmann) and a much older photographer in Paris in 1983.
Sex took place, but Ullmann picks at the event like an angry sore, with her inability to remember precisely what happened as much the book’s subject as the event itself. A startling, restless, discomforting piece of work that carefully teases apart rigid ideas about experience and truth, predator and victim.
THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus £22, 352pp)
THE Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, acclaimed for Westfront 1918 (1930) and The Threepenny Opera (1931) has fallen from popular memory, but Daniel Kehlmann mines fascinating territory in this fictionalised biographical portrait of a communist-leaning artist, who found himself cosying up to the Nazis in order to keep his career afloat during the Second World War.
Quite how Pabst regarded the propaganda films he produced is a floating question in this hallucinatory novel, which features walk-on parts for Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks (and a brilliantly chilling, loosely disguised Goebbels) alongside fictionalised aspects of Pabst’s life (including a floundering, excruciatingly awful period in Hollywood).
Throughout, Kehlmann sustains a pervading sickly sense of reality sliding perilously close to nightmare, which is quite possibly how the very private, principled Pabst came to regard his own life.
ALLEGRO PASTEL by Leif Randt (Granta Magazine Editions £12.99, 320pp)
‘JEROME didn’t want to schedule too much during the day. He had noticed with relief very early on in their relationship that, like him, Tanja felt the strong need to regularly withdraw silently to her laptop.’
I chose this quote by opening the book at random, but it sums up pretty well both the style and content of this lauded German novel about the relationship between a Berlin-based writer and a website designer living the painstakingly curated lives of your standard globalised millennial.
The toneless deadpan sentences take on a strange comic energy as Randt details the relentless self-absorption of two people who paradoxically appear to have no meaningful inner life at all. Its tough to read, like being forced to stare for hours at an achingly po-faced, self-aware and extended Instagram post – no wonder it’s being called a novel to capture the voice of a generation.