I reflected on the importance of place in terms of how we remember people when I was reading Linn Ullmann’s meditative work of autofiction, Unquiet.
Before I get to place (and grief), I will mention that it’s impossible to sort memoir from fiction in Unquiet. The protagonist is the daughter of a renowned Swedish filmmaker, by the actress he directed and once loved. Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Fårö island home, where she spends time with him and her eight half-siblings (her father had five marriages, but never married the protaganist’s mother).
The girl, like most children, enjoyed making lists and keeping count, and if anyone asked her about her father she could have said: My father has four houses, two cars, five wives, one swimming pool, nine children, and one cinema.
Her father had particular routines and rules –
The house was an extension of him. You were not allowed to move around in it as you liked, there were rules for everything, I would never, for example, have taken a glass of water from the kitchen into the living room. No one ever told me. No one said: You are not allowed to take a glass of water into the living room. It was something I knew… The long narrow house, lying stretched out with a view of the stony beach and Baltic Sea, maintained a chaste order whereby everyone who lived inside it, children and adults, saw to their work, watched the time, and avoided emotional hurly-burly. A small world sketched out and planned in advance.
In real life, Ullmann is the daughter of famed Swedish director and screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman, and equally famous Norwegian actress and director, Liv Ullmann. Bergman’s personal history and the details of major life events match what is in Unquiet. So… is the ‘fiction’ the recasting of conversations? A filling of gaps in a child’s memory? The only clue comes toward the end of the book when Ullmann states that in order to write about real people ‘…it is necessary to make them fictional. I believe this is the only way of breathing life into them. To remember is to look around, again and again, equally astonished every time.’ She goes on to say that she wanted to see what would happen if ‘…I allowed us to emerge in a book as though we didn’t belong anywhere else.’
The story focuses on the protagonist, as an adult – a writer, with children of her own – visiting her elderly father. He’s in his eighties, becoming frail and suffering memory loss. They decide to collaborate on a book about ageing – she asks the questions and records the answers. The project falters as her father’s health deteriorates, and after a summer of working together he dies.
When Papa died, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the tapes: the floundering, the slowness, the searching for words. And my voice like an overeager recorder player in the middle of the requiem.
After his death a different book emerges – Unquiet – the daughter’s story, and in this, she remembers her childhood.
As a child, I was occasionally allowed to visit him in his study and sit in the big battered armchair in order for us to converse. He called it a sitting. I remember wishing the sittings would never end.
“Shall we have a sitting tomorrow, you and I,” he’d say when I was a child, “around eleven if that suits you?”
“Okay.”
Ullmann’s observations about her father’s last months of life are startling in their accuracy (specific to her father) and in their familiarity (to the universal experience of death). For example, her father was obsessive about punctuality. Of a meeting planned with him during their last summer, she writes – ‘Death commenced when he arrived seventeen minutes late.’
Ullmann captures the ‘ongoing task’ of dying and says of those last few weeks with her father –
…he took a rapid turn for the worse. I don’t know whether rapid turn is the right expression here. The choreography of aging is complex. An intricate combination of quick and slow.
Despite her father’s increasing confusion, he had ‘…made arrangements for dying’, telling everyone around him, ‘I will lie in my own bed, in my own house, looking across the stony shore, the gnarled pines, the sea, and the ever-shifting light…’. He planned his funeral in meticulous detail, it being the last performance he could ‘direct’.
I am often asked why I do so much reading about grief. The answer is that I never tire of reading new words to capture a universal experience. In each of these final scenes with her father, Ullmann’s writing about grief is exceptional.
That summer everything was about dying, the work of dying, death leaning into life, life leaning into death, he would wake up in the morning and fall asleep at night, but died every day nonetheless. The heart was still beating, but the absence was overwhelming.
I have never been to a remote island in the Baltic Sea, but Ullmann’s writing took me there. Her descriptions of her summer days were beautifully immersive, and while I felt happily ensconced in her island world of brisk swims, movie screenings in a barn, and tearing around the bumpy roads in an old Jeep, I was also remembering my own childhood summers at McCrae, with my grandparents, where the days had a predictable rhythm.
And so to place. I mention my summers at McCrae – when the family fibro shack was sold, I was absolutely heartbroken and still feel that ache of grief. At the time, someone said to me, “It’s just a house” and in the depths of my loss, I didn’t have the clarity to say no, it’s not ‘just’ a house – it was my connection to my dearly loved grandparents, it was every summer of my life, it was being surrounded by family. I felt more about that house than I did about the one I grew up in. It was my most significant lesson in ambiguous grief, and to this day, it takes little to prod that pain. Unquiet prodded that pain over and over but not in a way that made me want to stop reading – instead, it was like pressing a bruise – a reminder that something that happened in the past is still there.
I adored this book. I don’t know who to recommend it to, short of saying it is one of the best pieces of writing about place, memory and grief that I’ve read.
4.5/5
Her father eats an omelette for lunch at one o’clock every day.
