Status
Available
Genres
Publication
New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2019]
Description
"He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, the youngest of nine children. Every summer, since she was a little girl, she visits him at his beloved stony house surrounded by woods, poppies, and the Baltic sea. Now that she's grown up and he's in his late eighties, he envisions a book about old age. He worries that he's losing his language, his memory, his mind. Growing old is hard work, he says. They will write it together. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. When she finally comes to the island, bringing her tape recorder with her, old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen" -- Front jacket flap.
User reviews
LibraryThing member bobbieharv
Decided I'd read The Cold Song before I read this, only to discover I'd already read and reviewed it here in 2015! I guess that's how unmemorable it was. This was much much better - she may be a better memoir than novel writer. Or possibly it's the subject matter - how abandoned she was and felt by
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her mother; how eccentric her father was. All in all a great story in beautiful settings. Show Less
LibraryThing member Big_Bang_Gorilla
Being a memoir of life with famed film and stage presences Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann by their daughter, a noted literary critic in her own right. Her reminiscences, puzzlingly, arrive billed as a novel, a status for which there is little if any evidence. If you have less cataloger's OCD than I
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and don't mind this anomaly, you'll find a book which is interesting, informative, and extremely well-written. The book is essentially an Ullmann sandwich; it begins with a short recollection of the small parts of her youth she spent with Bergman, proceeds to her growing up with Ullmann, and ends with an account of Bergman's last years and death, centered around a series of interviews which she recorded with him in his last weeks. Bergman's senescent musings occasionally achieve a certain delusional poetry, but mostly they're interesting only insofar as they mark the collapse of a powerful mind with old age, and thus are more than a little depressing. As for the total picture of the couple with which one leaves, I wouldn't call this quite a hatchet job, but neither do they come across particularly well. Show Less
LibraryThing member bibliothecarivs
I was surprised by how much Ullmann's portrayal of her father's last months affected me. In the patterns of his reasoning and speech I was reminded of my grandfather and my wife's grandfather at the same period in their lives. In fact, my grandfather was born the same year as Ullmann's father and
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died almost exactly two years after him. But because my grandfather rarely spoke to me and Ullmann's father was a public figure, unfortunately I know more about the latter than the former. Show Less
Awards
Nordisk Råds litteraturpris (Nominee — 2016)
Language
Original language
Norwegian