New Yorker Fiction Review #226: "Time for the Eyes to Adjust" by Linn Ullmann

Review of a short story from the Dec. 17, 2018 issue of The New Yorker...

I'm glad that I did not know Linn Ullmann is the daughter of Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman before I read this story. In fact, I probably wouldn't have even been able to pinpoint exactly who Ingmar Bergman was before I looked up Linn Ullmann's bio just a few moments ago. So it likely wouldn't have mattered anyway...

...except it would have meant that her story "Time for the Eyes to Adjust" is less a work of fiction and more a work of creative non-fiction. To me this fact lessens the achievement of this story, but not by much.

What we have here (translated from Norwegian) is an intricate, careful, and finely-tuned piece of memoir-ish fiction from what would appear to be a master writer, or else a master translator. Shout out to Thilo Reinhard (I'm lately of a mind that translators deserve more credit than they get).

Minus the father who is a famous film director (in the actual story, here) and the fact he has nine children with five different wives, this could pretty much be any other "My Hazy Childhood Memories" kind of story. The narrator, using a mix of first and third person, calling herself "the girl" and her mother "the mother" at various times, relates a fairly engaging and trauma-free story of a family and a childhood lived in the gargantuan wake of a world-famous, womanizing father. For what it's worth, the main character doesn't seem to much the worse for wear for it and still seems to have had a pretty "normal" childhood and healthy respect and love for her father.

I think this story succeeds precisely because it treats the father as just a regular dad with his regular dad quirks (he is extremely punctual, he demands that no one disturb him in the AM until he has listened to the weather report) and sees him through the evolving, and sort of clarifying lens of age. Hence, in my opinion, the title of the story at it's second level of meaning. The first level of meaning has to do with the family ritual of watching films together in the father's darkened cinema room in his home.

One really great thought I liked from this story: "It had seemed like such a good idea--a delightful idea!--when he first thought of it....But one should beware of one's own good ideas...You can become so smitten with the idea that you forget everything else."

In a nice "intertextuality moment," the main character / narrator credits this deeply profound thought to a Scandinavian writer named Aksel Sandemose. Given a bit more time I might uncover how specifically it relates to the story itself, to the girl's relationship with her father; however, it's a meaningful enough thought that I don't think it needs to be tied too specifically to any aspect of this story. Frankly, it's for gems like this that I continue to read literary fiction. A good nugget like this can stay with you for years, far longer than anything about the actual story itself.