Since retirement in 1986, Bergman (b. 1918) has become as prolific a writer as he was a director. Here, he follows his survey of his film output, Images (p. 1429), with a sequel to his novel The Best Intentions (1993—not reviewed). Both novels have been filmed. Sunday's Children will open in the States in April, while The Best Intentions is already on videocassette. In that book, Bergman told of the romance between his parents, and of the logs thrown in their path by their families. Now we have the script-length story of their eight-year-old son, Pu, who was born with the gift of clairvoyance granted to Sunday's children (and movie directors). Mother rents Pastor Dahlberg's odd set of joined and painted boxes that he calls a summer house. Father, himself a pastor, sets forth to join his summering family, and Pu runs off to the train station to meet him. This is a day out of heaven and hell, a countryside of great natural beauty in which Pu watches two calves slaughtered, has various hints of sex, is worried sick that his parents will split up. There is a big summer- cottage dinner scene like that in Wild Strawberries; Pu helps his grandmother go to the privy past midnight, hears his parents arguing in the small hours. In inspired flash-forwards, the sexy Maj years later drowns herself because she's pregnant, and Ingmar (Pu at 50) visits Father, their roles reversed, Father now a mumbling widower of 82, ridden by hereditary muscular dystrophy, his feet locked into orthopedic boots, his spiritual faith devastated. Young Pu goes on a trip with choleric Father, who must preach at a far village, and Ingmar the Author is reconciled with Father in a magnificent scene out of the climax of De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. A Nobel for Ingmar? He deserves it many times over.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-244-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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