BIRD OF PASSAGE

Mai Zetterling, one of Bergman's early associates, has been writing short stories and short novels like Night Games--here a hundred-odd pages about a woman who's spent five years of ""living death"" in an ""asylum"" after an unfortunate ""whirlpool of love"" with a priest. She had permitted their child to drown in its bath and she herself has been submerged. Now she drives feverishly on the roadways until she glimpses a boy at an airport, a diminutive reflection of herself, follows him, brings him small things to eat, and is regeneratively rewarded when he tentatively gives her an egg. All the images, borrowed from that other medium, do not improve the writing from ""balsamic"" trees to ""goatling"" children along with unsightlier touches of verite, hairy underarms, incontinence, and dogs in many positions. Bedraggled and excessive.