W.Han Lin Ulman’s father was well into his 80s, he began to refer to the life he now feels as the “epilogue”. Lying in bed in the morning, he would overcome his ailments, giving himself one every decade: if less than eight, he would get; If there were more, it would be placed. But these strategies signaled reality rather than appeasement, and their determination to continue working largely remained the same.
Llman’s father was not Ingmar Bergam, the director of the Swedish film, and the work he decided to do in his last years was a collaboration with his daughter, who would get something out of her life and thoughts as she reached the end. Recalling the beginning of the project she talks to me from Oslo, emphasizing the centrality of the creative process in Ulman Bergman’s life. “When it works, you know, then we know what we do. We’re working: good. When we were going to write the book, we had a lot of fun discussing how, what form it would take. He jokingly said that his chosen title was “Laid and Sled in the Eldorado Valley”, a phrase he had always hoped to use for a movie name.
Instead, a decade after his death in 2007, what emerged was Ulman’s sixth novel, Unnatural, A powerful and unsettling hybrid of memoirs, literature and meditation, braided together in a one-piece composition that, among other things, the love of Bach Bergman Cello Sweets.
That is, he tells me, a work made on “the ruins of a book I have not written.” As the father and daughter happily planned their project in numerous letters, phone calls and meetings, Bergman “kept getting older.” In the spring and summer before his death, until the fine work began, the physical weakness combined with something else: “Things had changed a lot; In just a few months, her language had changed, the memory loss was now clear to her and to me. It was as if all the windows of his mind were open so that things that were real and things that were like fantasy or a dream – he did not always have the ability to see the difference. “
The six conversations between them, recorded in Hammers, Bergman’s home on the Swedish island of Ferry, are an important part of that. Unnatural But for many years Alman didn’t even listen to them, believing it to be part of a “huge fiasco” that had become an unfinished project: “Listening to those tapes was almost physically painful. So I just put the tape recorder… I mean I should start first, I should insist that we do it first, I should ask different questions while we are sitting there, there should be a tape recorder because the tape recorder is rigid Was. I shouldn’t be so ched. “It was her husband, author Niels Frederick Dahl, who persuaded her to retrieve the recorder from the attic:” You don’t want to hear that you’re writing this book anymore? And then I heard it. And I transcribed it. I translated it from Swedish into Norwegian. And it was just fun. “
These early feelings, of course, are an intense form of regret that often accompanies death; The realization that we behaved differently, that we have somehow eased our grief, or saved something tangible for our loved one. But in the case of llman, something special about the experience is especially important – something special understanding is given.
She was born in 1966, the year Bergman celebrated Persona Was published. Her mother, Norwegian actor Liv Ulman, was the co-star of the film, in which she played a woman – but also an actor – who suddenly stopped speaking and was taken to a hut by a nurse played by BB Anderson. Bergman wrote the script – quickly, while recovering from pneumonia – with both women in mind; And it was filmed on the ferry, which he later created not only a home but also a kind of state, endlessly adding buildings that included a cinema and a writing lodge.
Bergam and Na and Nlman, who went on to collaborate in 10 films, started a relationship. He was 47 years old, married four times and father eight children; She was 20 years her junior, and even got married (actually, Dr. Lin was present at the birth of her husband Lin). After the director and n lman, often referred to as one of her shit, divorced, she remarried. Lynn, her ninth and final child, spent her summer at Hammer; The rest of the time she spent time with her mother in Os Slow and U.S. Lived in, with her grandmother, and Lane was on her feet when she was away from work. He writes, “I was her child and her child.” Unnatural, But not /Their/ Baby, those three of us were never; When I browse the pictures spread out on my desk, there are no photographs of the three of us together. That and that and I. That constellation does not exist. “
The final form of the book gradually became clear; The first-person narrative intersects with a more novelistic prose, in which “girl”, “father” and “mother” orbit each other. Their names – either real or invented – are never given. At one point when I mention “you” in the story, Ulman gently corrects it to “girl”. But she has no intention of suggesting that the lives of her and her family do not form a basis for her Unnatural; Instead, she says, she wanted to allocate space between the genres. He tells me, “I’m in the middle of this word,” and quotes writers like Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, John Burger, Edwij Dentiket and Emily Dickinson, as well as choreographers Pina Bausch and Mars Cunningham and musician John. Cage.
If Bergman continues to focus on the book, Liv Ulman, now 81, lives in his wilder margin. Hammers ’solitude and introspection represents the world of Bergman, the Alman Cannon between Oslo, Los Angeles and New York, often accompanied by his daughter, whose experiences include having her hair cut by Margot Fontaine in the Manhattan Hotel corridor and sent a tin of caviar. By his mother’s Russian sweater. Her parents’ different ways also reflect their different roles in the culture: “a very traditional male artist, another female actress, a spectator, and another eye.”
As a child, Lynn remembers her intense love for her mother, which included a lot of trouble, if, for example, her mother stuck a few minutes late: “I was madly in love with my mother. Not just for her incredible beauty, and I will also write about that beauty: how vivid and strong and insane beauty she is and what she does for us, and desire. But when you are a child and you are struck by such incredible love, you have no words for it. When you’re an adult either desperate for beauties, you don’t really have words for it, it’s a longing, and it’s the realization that if this person disappears, I’ll die. I can’t live. “
While I would often say that it would have been difficult for the mother to have disappeared so often, it is easy for her to point out that Ulman was a married woman in the 1970s, as well as an unmarried mother, and that she was alive. Often in crucial public glare. Lynn herself hated the paparazzi photographs she showed, and felt humiliated by the evidence of her own childhood, as she wore a plastic folder around her neck as she traveled solo plane to reunite with her mother: “I didn’t want to be Baby. I didn’t know how to be a kid. I was a little embarrassed to have a baby. “I ask her what her mother made out of the book.” She knows what it’s all about, “he replies with a touch of pettiness.” I mean, he’s an artist. “
Towards the end of Unnatural, 16-year-old strikes alone for Paris. What she encounters will be considered the second part of Yulm’s conceivable which is the loose trilogy. He says, “The portrait of the girl just stopped. “He is not moving forward, and he is not looking for a mother or a girl Next. Ancient, you will find it again when you are. Fortisoming. Now I am more ancient [she is 54]. Then I will write from this place of antiquity. ”
When Unnatural First published in Norway, a journalist scolded him and asked if he could take “five minutes” to get through the facts in the literature and the book. He laughs. Five minutes won’t really start to do it justice. In fact, it seems, it could be a lifetime task.
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