The Cold Song

by Linn Ullmann Narrated by Heather Wilds

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Leah Hager Cohen

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…Ullmann's voice on the page is a lean, tough-minded thing, scrubbed and scoured of sentimentality straight through to the final, Carveresque pages, in which she pulls off an 11th-hour radiance, a tonal shift from minor to major key. The novel's charm lies in these idiosyncratic glints, these glimmers of queer wit, uncensored scorn or sudden, unstinting sympathy. Like Alma, Ullmann can't be depended upon to comply neatly with form. As with Alma, you trust her all the more for it.

Publishers Weekly

01/27/2014
The discovery of a corpse, presumed to be a murder victim, comes very early in this involving fifth novel from Ullmann (Before You Sleep). But it serves mostly as a basis for the author’s subtle and menacing look at family dynamics. The story proceeds through flashbacks to those who were connected with the victim, a 19-year-old nanny named Milla. The prose is almost clinically cool, and the reader observes as three young boys digging for buried treasure find the body, then as an extended cast of characters react to the news of Milla’s death. Milla worked as a nanny for young Alma and Liv, daughters of restaurateur Siri Brodal and her novelist husband Jon Dreyer, who are both struggling in their careers and their marriage. The family is spending the summer with Siri’s mother, Jenny, an imperious woman closing in on 75, in her huge, elegant house by the sea in rural Norway. As a role model for Alma and a constant irritant to Siri, Milla upsets further the already-delicate 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. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

"The fifth novel by an award-winning Norwegian author and critic deserves to win her a much larger stateside readership." ---Kirkus Starred Review

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2014-02-20
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 author's command is such that it never reads like a pastiche or suffers from jarring shifts of tone. The plot focuses on the events of one day, the 75th birthday of Jenny Brodal, a cold and caustic woman who's so resistant to the party being thrown in her honor that she ends her sobriety of almost 20 years and gets roaring drunk. Jenny's daughter Siri, who throws the elaborate party, is a chef and restaurateur. Her husband, Jon, is a mostly forgotten novelist with the worst case of writer's block since The Shining. He's also a narcissistic lecher and the source of the novel's comedy. He had "planned to write a hymn to everything that endures and everything that falls apart. But truth be told he wasn't sure what he actually meant." The couple's two daughters remain on the novel's periphery, though one of them is seriously and increasingly disturbed. The girls' nanny, Milla—who has "breasts that men couldn't help staring at''— has developed a mutual attraction with Jon, which strains both of their relationships with Siri. Echoes of dead children, grieving parents, empty marriages and broken lives abound. The day of the party becomes both farce and tragedy, with Milla disappearing and Jenny's drunken decline leaving questions until the very end. The author might be best known in this country as the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, but her accomplishment here merits more than recognition by association.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171014346
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/18/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

But something was wrong. Siri held her breath. It had to do with Milla. Or something else. But Milla definitely had something to do with it. Her presence here at Mailund. The slightly lumpish body, the long dark hair (long dark hairs on the kitchen counter, in the bathroom sink, between the sofa and the sofa cushions, on the base-boards and doorframes), her face, sometimes pretty, sometimes not, beseeching eyes.
 
More and more Siri found herself having to concentrate in order to keep herself in check—was that the expression? Keep oneself in check? Be one. One body, one voice, one mouth, one thread, and not fall apart, dissolve, collapse in a heap.
 
“Your main responsibility,” Siri said, “will be to look after Liv for five hours or so every day. But we’d be grateful if you’d keep an eye on Alma as well. Alma’s twelve. She’s”—Siri searched for the right word —“a bit of a loner.”
 
Milla laughed hesitantly, brushed the hair back from her pretty moon face and said that she thought it all sounded really great.
 
It was a mild, bright day in May and Siri had invited Milla to the house in Oslo. The idea was for them to get to know each other a little better before the summer. Alma was at school, Liv was at nursery school, and Jon had gone for a long walk with Leopold. Something about a chapter he was having trouble writing.
 
Milla had replied to the ad on the Internet for a summer job and Siri had been taken with her application. In her e-mail she came across as a happy, friendly, reliable girl. It would be fantastic to get to know all of you and be able to be part of your family this summer. If I get the job I’ll do my best to be a good “big sister” to your daughters so that you and your husband won’t have to worry when you’re at work.

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