A Good Reader

I was interested to know how an artistic ego as autonomous and fully realized as Ullmann’s had managed to form despite, as Gulliksen said, her being the daughter of “those people”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/magazine/linn-ullmann-unquiet.html

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
ZADIE SMITH

“It was very important,” Gulliksen told me, “that she was a critic before she was a novelist. We haven’t had a critic like her afterward.” Speak to writers in Norway as I did, and a clear consensus forms: Ullmann was the most important literary critic of her generation, a James Wood of Norwegian writing. Unable to read Norwegian, I wanted to know what that meant.

“You understood that every time she wrote about a book,” Gulliksen explained, “she didn’t only write about the book, but she wrote about how to read, about what it can mean in a broader context. She could write about Roland Barthes in a way that everybody could feel ‘Oh, I have to read this writer.’ So she was providing access to great literature in a very organic and convincing way, and she wrote about young Norwegian writers — important at that time because we needed it. So she did both. And it was very important that she was that kind of critic before she started publishing novels. She convinced the literary community that she was something.”