Cold Song (Ullmann)

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