Cold Song (Ullmann)

The Cold Song
Linn Ullmann, 2011 (Eng. trans., 2013)
Other Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590516676


Summary
Ullmann’s characters are complex and paradoxical: neither fully guilty nor fully innocent

Siri Brodal, a chef and restaurant owner, is married to Jon Dreyer, a famous novelist plagued by writer’s block. Siri and Jon have two daughters, and together they spend their summers on the coast of Norway, in a mansion belonging to Jenny Brodal, Siri’s stylish and unforgiving mother.

Siri and Jon’s marriage is loving but difficult, and troubled by painful secrets. They have a strained relationship with their elder daughter, Alma, who struggles to find her place in the family constellation. When Milla is hired as a nanny to allow Siri to work her long hours at the restaurant and Jon to supposedly meet the deadline on his book, life in the idyllic summer community takes a dire turn. One rainy July night, Milla disappears without a trace. After her remains are discovered and a suspect is identified, everyone who had any connection with her feels implicated in her tragedy and haunted by what they could have done to prevent it.

The Cold Song is a story about telling stories and about how life is continually invented and reinvented. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 9, 1966
• Where—Oslo, Norway
• Education—B.A., New York University
• Awards—Readers' Prize; Amalie Skram Award; Golden Pen (all Norwegian)
• Currently—lives in Oslo, Norway


Linn Ullmann (originally Karin Beate Ullmann) is a Norwegian author and journalist. She is the daughter of actress, author and director Liv Ullmann and director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman. She graduated from New York University, where she studied English literature and began work on her Ph.D. A prominent literary critic, she also writes a column for Norway's leading morning newspaper and has published four novels.

Writing
When her first and critically acclaimed novel Before You Sleep was published in 1998, she was already known as an influential literary critic. Her second novel, Stella Descending was published in 2001 and her third novel Grace was published in 2002. For Grace, Ullmann received the literary award The Readers' Prize in Norway, and the book was named one of the top ten novels that year by the prestigious newspaper Weekendavisen in Denmark. In 2007, Grace was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the United Kingdom, and in March the same year, the Norwegian theater Riksteatret played a successful run of the theatrical play Grace, based on the novel.

Ullmann's fourth novel A Blessed Child was published in Norway in 2005 and shortlisted for the prestigious Norwegian literature prize—the Brage Prize. In 2007, she was awarded the Amalie Skram Award for her literary work, and she received Gullpennen (the Golden Pen) for her journalism in Norway's leading morning newspaper Aftenposten. In 2008, A Blessed Child was named Best Translated novel in the British newspaper The Independent, and in 2009 the novel was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the UK. Her fifth novel, The Cold Song, was published in Norway in late 2011. It was translated into English in 2013 by Barbara J. Haveland and published in the U.S. in 2014.

Ullmann's novels are published throughout Europe and the United States and are translated into 30 languages.

Literary awards
Gold Pen (Norwegian) (2007)
Amalie Skram Prize (Norwegian) (2007)
Norwegian Readers' Prize (Norwegian) (2002)

Other
Ullmann is co-founder (2009) and former Artistic Director of the international artist residency foundation The Bergman Estate on Faro. She served on the jury for the main competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

Ullmann is married to Niels Fredrik Dahl, a novelist, playwright and poet. They live in Oslo. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/16/2014.)

Book Reviews
Although a vicious crime serves as the grain of sand around which this pearl of a novel is formed, Linn Ullmann's The Cold Song is not a crime story…Yet the novel…is steeped in dread the way a fruitcake is steeped in rum: Every page, every line, seems to glisten with vapors of sumptuous, intoxicating unease.
Leah Hager Cohen - New York Times Book Review


Ullmann’s rural Norway is an unfussy place, eloquent for its starkness, much like the spare language she paints it with. Her stage is less about physical place than mood and one’s place in the familial symmetry. While much happens in this novel, the events feel secondary. The prose is taut, yet the pace is languid as summer in that before-the-storm tension…The real achievement of this novel is Ullmann’s gift to imbue the tension of a thriller via the unease of the mundane…Yes, a murder occurs, but The Cold Song is more a mystery in the way most families tend to be mysteries unto themselves.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


The discovery of a corpse...serves mostly as a basis for the author’s subtle and menacing look at family dynamics.... Ullmann teeters between dark comedy of manners and genuine psychological thriller, but she consistently captures the telling moments in everyday encounters, and writes seductively complex characters.
Publishers Weekly


In her fifth novel, Ullman demonstrates her expertise in inhabiting the minds of complex characters, including Milla’s grieving parents; a neighbor who may have been the last to see Milla alive; Siri’s aging mother; Siri’s elder daughter, who has a violent temper; and, of course, the beleaguered couple, Siri and Jon. Readers who appreciate an unconventional narrative flow will find this a deeply moving story of troubled relationships and unsettled memories.
Booklist


(Starred review.) The fifth novel by an award-winning Norwegian author and critic deserves to win her a much larger stateside readership. The latest and best from Ullmann (A Blessed Child, 2008, etc.) resists categorization, except as a literary page-turner.It's a murder mystery. It's a multigenerational psychodrama of a dysfunctional family. And it's a very dark comedy of manners. Yet the authors command is such that it never reads like a pastiche or suffers from jarring shifts of tone.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Cold Song takes its name from the eponymous aria in Henry Purcell’s opera King Arthur. Jon Dreyer, plagued by writer’s block, listens repeatedly to the late Klaus Nomi’s rendition of “The Cold Song.” What role does wasted talent play in The Cold Song?

2. Why does Milla’s mother send Jon text messages about Milla’s death instead of confronting him directly? What other instances of indirect confrontation do you find in The Cold Song, and why do you think they occur?

3. Examine K.B.’s role in the novel. Why does he remain a minor character, even though his actions spark the central conflict of the story? What other important characters/conflicts arise and then fade into the periphery of the narrative?

4. Jon Dreyer writes to-do lists, e-mails, and text messages in his study, but rarely chapters of his novel. What role do different forms of storytelling play in The Cold Song? How do the stories Siri, Jon, and Jenny tell themselves and each other differ from reality?

5. Alma and Milla share a special relationship. Why doesn’t Alma mention that she’d seen Milla in the woods on the night of her murder?

6. Siri tries to maintain an appearance of calm, despite the chaos she experiences all around her. Why are appearances so important to her? Why does Siri insist on throwing the party for her mother when Jenny doesn’t want one at all? Consider their relationship and her mother’s anger. In what other ways does Jenny “divide” herself (p. 70)? How does this habit influence her other relationships?

7. From the outset of the novel, Siri feels uncomfortable around Milla. Jon feels uncomfortable around his daughter, Alma, and at one point even expresses the worry that his daughter does not understand him. How does Siri’s unease differ from Jon’s?

8. Many characters in the novel are denied a sense of resolution or closure—Jon never completes his novel, Jenny never successfully defeats her alcoholism, and Siri never resolves her uncertain relationship with Milla. At the end of the novel, Amanda tells Siri and Jon, “We can’t move on.” Does the final scene promise resolution for Milla’s parents, or do you think that closure is impossible?

9. The mother-daughter bonds in The Cold Song are tense and riven with secret wounds and grievances. Jenny and Siri, Siri and Alma, even Milla and Amanda have troubled relationships. What significance do these relationships hold for you?

10. Throughout the novel, Milla is depicted from the perspective of many different characters—Simen, Siri, Jon, her parents, etc.—and yet readers rarely gain access into her own mind. She is remembered through photographs, newspaper articles, and other frozen images created by others. In what ways is Milla objectified, viewed as a spectacle more than an autonomous human being? Why is this important?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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