Unquiet

December 15, 2018
A brilliant meditation on time, mortality, and the limits of memory.Ullmann is a journalist, a literary critic, and the author of several novels--most recently The Cold Song (2014). She is also the daughter of the actor Liv Ullmann and the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. This memoir in the shape of a novel--or novel based on memoir--began as a series of conversations the writer had with her father shortly before he died. While much of the book is devoted to her early life--when her father was fit and commanding--a sense of loss permeates the narrative. Ullmann recounts the precise instant when it became clear that the man she knew was gone: The studiously punctual Bergman is late to meet her for a movie showing, a daily ritual that has been part of his life for decades. Ullmann is shocked in the moment, but it's only in retrospect that she recognizes it for what it is. The recordings Ullmann made--which appear in transcript form throughout the book--function more as talismans than as documentary evidence of the man her father was. The sound quality is poor. The conversation is halting, and there are gaps in Bergman's memory. What Ullmann wants to capture is already in the process of disappearing. So, she's left with her own memories. Certainly, her memories are singular. Bergman had multiple wives and mistresses and many, many children and grandchildren, all of whom come and go on the isolated island where the director has made his home. Ullmann's situation is exceptional, but the emotional experiences she describes are poignant and accessible. When she recounts scenes from her childhood, she sometimes speaks in the first person and she sometimes calls herself "the girl," underscoring the sense in which past selves are constructions we create in the present. And, of course, her memories of her father as a younger man may be vivid, but they are no more reliable than those garbled digital recordings of her father in his decline. Ullmann's prose is elegant (her translator deserves some credit for this), sharp, and occasionally funny. But the mood of this work as a whole is elegiac. "Can I," she asks, "mourn people who are still alive?"Gorgeous and heartbreaking.

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A daughter assembles the pieces of her father's long life, and in doing so gathers some of the pieces of her own life as well. In this case, her parents are the acclaimed actress Liv Ullman and the legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. The author meets with her father as he nears the end of his days in a treasured spot near the Baltic Sea, where she records their conversations, until it finally becomes apparent that his memory is failing. A few years after his passing, she creates a story, part memoir and part fiction, that features their private talks interspersed with her own charming, clear-eyed memories as a young girl fortunate to enjoy a way of life that was at once simple yet steeped in culture. VERDICT To examine the soul of Ingmar Bergman, a man so private and so iconic, requires much deconstruction and reconstruction, not unlike the careful editing of a film. Ullman succeeds on every level, blending time, memory, and emotion into a fascinating and intimate portrait that easily evokes the universal sense of love and loss. Highly recommended.--Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L.

January 1, 2019
Ullmann's ?lithe sixth novel (following The Cold Song, 2014) flickers like film threaded through a projector, shifting between dark and light, past and present, autobiography and fiction. Like the author, who is the daughter of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, the book's self-deprecating narrator is the daughter of a legendary Swedish director and the much-younger woman who starred in some of his most famous films. Her father has nine children with five women. She is the youngest, and her parents, who never married, weren't together long. She now looks back on a jaggedly disjointed childhood briefly redeemed by precious summer weeks with her father in his orderly home on a spare Swedish island. Papa had been so punctual and disciplined that the eventual effects of age's cruel diminishments on him disorient everyone. The narrator manages to record six late-life interviews with him, and brief excerpts appear within her gracefully exquisite, sharply funny, and richly poignant reminiscences. In order to write about real people, Ullmann's stand-in observes, . . . it is necessary to make them fictional. I believe this is the only way of breathing life into them. Ullmann's homage to family, art, beauty, and love is resplendently vital, and enchantingly evocative.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)