I found this to be quite disappointing, to be honest, and I struggled to finish. The rave reviews made me think this would be raw, urgent, revealing book in the style of Knausgaard and Cusk, but I found it quite flat and dull - very recitative. I didn't care about what I was being told and felt very uninvolved. I don't know very much about the lives of her famous parents (I know, I know, I'm an uncultured swine), so maybe that was also part of the problem. So this ultimately wasn't for me, unfortunately. Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

This is part memoir and part fiction, where we see Linn Ullmann create something very special from her fractured relationship with her film director father, Ingmar Bergman, of whom she had started making recordings of before his death. The story manifests as a stream of consciousness where we jump from one memory to the next in a dreamlike, meditative way. This is an exquisitely written and unusual story - one that you need to take time over - but this is well spent and very much worth the effort.

Like nothing else I’ve read, Unquiet is a reflective, contemplative examination of the impact of parents and the repercussions of the choices they make, both big and small.
Based on the author’s own life growing up with an actor mother (Liv Ullmann) and a film director father (Ingmar Bergman), Unquiet is an evocative exploration of place, people, and upbringing. Confronted by her father’s aging on the Swedish island of her childhood summers, the unnamed protagonist reflects on her childhood – divided between her mother year-round and her father in the summers. What follows is a mediation on families, ageing, and what makes you who you are.
The writing is clean, yet evocative, the story forming in vignettes that shift in time and space yet remain emotionally vibrant throughout.

A quietly breathtaking tale that is hard to define.
Part memoir and part fiction, Ullmann has created something special from what she describes as ‘the ruins of a book’ she didn’t write as planned with her film director father, Ingmar Bergman, who she had started making recordings of before his death.
This story does not follow a standard course, but rather it is fragmented and moves so quickly from memory to memory as though it is more of a stream of consciousness - it could at times be difficult to leap from one time to another, but felt as though you were revisiting Ullmann’s memories as they came to her which is far more natural. As her father grew older and began to lose his words, the recordings take on a dreamlike quality where you can’t quite separate fact from fiction and it is quite heartbreaking to see so clearly the loss of knowledge and memories he is experiencing through his daughter’s eyes.
This isn’t a story that grips you immediately and can’t be put down, but rather one that is so exquisitely written and so unusual that you need time to sit with it and appreciate it - in fact, I am still putting the pieces together now.

This is a beautifully written meditation on grwoing up, growing old and the creative life. Ullman weaves narrative, interviews with her father and memories into a powerful and warm memior and exploration of relationship.

Linn Ullmann has chosen to call this memoir a novel, and I’m not quite sure why, because as a novel it’s confusing, jumping about in time and place, and about characters who don’t feel convincing. But when read as a memoir it becomes quite a different book, exploring as it does Ullmann’s relationship with her parents, the actress Liv Ullmann and her father, acclaimed director and filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. I found the book a thoughtful, intelligent and insightful exploration of the relationship between her parents and their relationship to their daughter. Neither of them were models of parental love and concern, which deeply affected Linn herself, especially as she had to shuttle between them during her childhood. She examines just what it was like to be the daughter of these self-centred, self-obsessed and deeply flawed individuals, and also explores the nature of memory. Which perhaps explains her decision to write the book as a novel – she can write what she remembers without having to be factually accurate. She pays tribute to her parents without shying away from the fact that she suffered from their neglect. Hers was a fragmented life, just as this is a fragmented book, but nevertheless a compelling and engaging one.

I found this a beguilingly strange and elusive piece of writing. Drawing on the author's life with her famous parents, but playing with the categories of fiction and autofiction, this reminded me of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy though here the focus is on child-parent relationships, aging and memory rather than Cusk's concern with marriage/love relationships. The prose is beautiful at the sentence level but it deliberately doesn't flow with shifts and jumps, mimicking a mind loosened and disordered as memory clambers over thought.

The text is permeated with intertexts, not just literary but also including music, and there's a musical rhythm in the way motifs and themes play out and replay themselves - it's clever and thoughtful but can also be a little wearying as the text echoes and repeats itself.
Characters are unnamed and somewhat unmoored, tied to places, perhaps, rather than to each other.

There's a strange grace about the whole thing but I'd suggest this might be challenging to readers looking for a more straightforward piece of conventional storytelling: recommended, though, for fans of experimental writing who don't mind pushing the boundaries of what constitutes 'fiction'.

A very quiet and lethargic rhythm to the text which does not help the beginning of the novel, things are very still, and the reader goes under a very slow acclimatisation to the rhythm of the novel. I feel that the interview sections, that whilst to begin with liven the reading experience they eventually give pause to the evolution of the text entering cruise control. However, once the text is has reached an end UNQUIET is a somewhat well put together novel about the interconnectedness of Time and Memory, but it was a real uphill battle to get there, a read that was only really made easier by the reader finding the relaxed pace of the later sections of the novel more consistent than the previous. UNQUIET looks for no answers but doesn’t raise any, the text has a restless nature that is both for and against the text, but then so is the function of our memory; lost in an unexplainable sea of UNQUIET.

Fictional memoir of Swedish filmmaker Liv Ullman, beutifully dreamlike written.

Calm and serene.
I highly recommend it.

Unquiet by Linn Ullmann is one of my favourite fictional-memoirs of this year. It is a calm, beautiful and graceful rendition of human memory.

Written by Ullmann who is the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, Unquiet is as much about the last years of Ingmar Bergman as it is about Liv Ullmann’s attempt to work in the 80s in the US while struggling to be a mother or Linn’s own struggles with being left alone by both her parents while shuttling between Faroe, Stockholm and the US.

There is a strange angst and peace throughout the writing. Ullmann calls herself ‘the girl’ as a reminder of her outsider status in Bergman’s life. With her illustrious father, she is jumpy in their dialogues as she interviews him while his memory continues to fade. His disconnected thoughts on music, craft, perseverance and practice remind you of the diligence it takes to be at the top of your craft.

The dialogue and descriptions in Unquiet are fragmented, fleeting and dream like. As a reader, you observe this father- daughter or mother- daughter duo and think about all that’s left unsaid between them as much as what is said. Almost every other line in the book is quoteworthy, thanks to the outstanding translation of Thilo Reinhard.

I read it slowly, cherishing every line and that in itself is a testimony to how good the writing is. Highly, highly recommended.