Before You Sleep [Hardcover]

Linn Ullmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999

A beautifully rendered, keenly detailed, and sexually frank novel about motherhood and marriage, love and infidelity

Spanning three generations in the life of a Norwegian family, Before You Sleep sparkles with wisdom, acuity, and style and carries with it the excitement of a genuine literary discovery. As the novel moves from present-day Oslo to 1930's Brooklyn, Ullmann tells her story through the voices of the eccentric and formidable women of the Blom family whose passions and prejudices have formed an intricate web that bonds grandmother to mother, and mother to child.

Hailed by European critics as "a real masterpiece," and "playful and melancholy, entertaining and disquieting," Before You Sleep unflinchingly explores the emotional terrain of marriage and motherhood, which Karin, the novel's young, complicated narrator, characterizes as "an endless stream of broken promises." Karin's wry, witty, and candid perspective suffuses the novel and it is she who introduces us to the others: her sister Julie, a wife and mother nearly destroyed by her husband's infidelity; their mother Anni, the irresistible seductress, and Aunt Selma, who drinks to stay mean and who fries girls' ears for breakfast.

Linn Ullmann's marvelously accomplished and assured debut, already an international sensation, unfolds with the sweep and color of a symphony and heralds the arrival of a mature and gifted literary talent.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Karin Blom, the narrator of Linn Ullmann's Before You Sleep is neither irresistible like her mother, Anni, nor beautiful like her sister, Julie, but as it turns out, this might be a very good thing. For short, dark, scrappy Karin is the survivor in a family filled with fractured personalities:

If I tried to describe my family, and that's exactly what I'm going to do, you could probably say that Anni drank to forget. I drank to be happy. Father drank just to keep going. Grandma drank to sleep better at night. Aunt Selma drank to be even meaner than she already was.

And Julie, Karin informs us, is the only one who drinks sensibly--"unfortunately! It did her no good. She didn't forget, she wasn't happy, she couldn't sleep and she was never mean." Told mainly in flashback, Ullmann's first novel traces the unhappy history of the Blom family--Anni's mother, June, and her sister Selma, whose rivalry over Anni's father caused a permanent rift; Anni's own unsuccessful union with Karin and Julie's father; and Julie's failing marriage to a man she's sure is unfaithful to her. Ullmann takes the reader from Norway to New York and back again as she weaves past into present, gradually creating a fully dimensional portrait of these women and their relationships to men and to each other. If Anni gets by on charm and melodrama, and Julie on her beauty, then Karin relies on a combination of willpower and lies to carry her through. In the end, it seems her strategy is best.

If the emotional tangles and subtle workings of this novel seem reminiscent of an Ingmar Bergman film, Linn Ullmann comes by it honestly. The daughter of Bergman and the actress Liv Ullmann, she has inherited her father's eye for what lies beneath the most placid-seeming surfaces, and her mother's less-is-more delivery. But Ullmann is a talent unto herself, and the novel's rather downbeat themes are nicely buoyed by Karin's slightly sardonic narrative. --Margaret Prior

From Publishers Weekly

A rich portrayal of mother-daughter relationships, Ullmann's ambitious first novel spans nearly 70 years and four generations of a Norwegian family perpetually in battle with itself. Narrated by Karin Blom, the capriciously clever and willfully unmarried youngest daughter of the third generation, the novel opens with Karin and her nephew Sander, waiting for a phone call from Julie, Sander's mother and Karin's sister. Julie is in Italy with her husband, Aleksander, where the two are making a last-ditch effort to save their marriage. The tension is such that the reader immediately senses that any news from a relative in this family is bad news. Julie's matrimonial woes unpleasantly echo the divorce of the sisters' parents, the annoyingly eccentric but "irresistible" Anni, and the distant, uncommunicative man Karin calls only "Father." This in turn leads Karin back to her grandfather Rikard, who turned his back on his homeland and made his fortune in Depression-era New York, and whose own marriage to Anni's mother, June, sowed the seeds of family strife. Karin's entire family experience has made her equate truth and intimacy with negativity and despair, and so she impulsively crafts elaborate tall tales and seduces men in the manner of a child playing at war. Ullmann deftly offsets her slow-building drama with Karin's fantasy sequences and perversely uproarious caricatures of family members. Ullmann, who has lived in both Oslo and New York, always provides fine background detail, but it is the irrepressible Blom women who attract the reader's sympathy. Rights sold in the U.K., Sweden, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal, Greece, Brazil, Holland, Israel, Finland and Denmark; 10-city author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1ST edition (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067099698X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670886982
• ASIN: 067088698X
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,074,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Family ties, love, and infedility, January 16, 2000

By 

CoffeeGurl - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Before You Sleep (Hardcover)

Before You Sleep is a story about a family whose dysfunctional stories begin in the 1930s with the narrator's grandfather. The stories about her sister and her cheating husband, her mother's eccentric personality, her father's reluctant existance, and the narrator, Karin, a seductress that gets the man that she wants at all cost.

The story is mainly focused on infedility--we are shown just how incredibly weak some men are and doesn't take them long to become unfaithful. Karin seduced several married men, and then she noticed how the guilt from the men turned them into especially sweet and attentive husbands later on. It is very real and emotional and even a bit quirky at times--this is a great story about a family that is less than perfect, but still you can somehow feel the love and the ties that bond.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not for me, March 2, 2000

By 

E. B. Glass (Decatur, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before You Sleep (Hardcover)

I gave this book a shot, but by the end I was too confused and tired to care what happened to the characters. The deception, rambling, and exaggeration proved to be too much for my little mind to take. In some ways I guess it was stimulating (since I spent so much time struggling over whether I should believe the narrator), but not in a way that I found particularly enjoyable.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A LUMINOUS FIRST NOVEL, October 6, 2000

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before You Sleep (Hardcover)

From the daughter of film director Ingmar Bergman, who showcased emotionally fractured personalities, and actress Liv Ullmann one might anticipate a rather Bergmanesque first novel. Before You Sleep is that with spare scenes, bleak humor, and dysfunctional family relationships. However, there is more, much more - the pages resonate with a uniquely original contemporary voice.

Were Linn Ullmann not the offspring of two such gifted parents odds are that her debut would still be an international bestseller for she may have learned, she may have inherited, but she has synthesized her legacy into a thought provoking vision that is solely her own .Blessed with rich imagination and discerning eye she has fashioned an intriguing fictional memoir. With the sometimes dark but always perceptive ruminations of a young woman as its matrix Before You Sleep is rich with incandescent prose and revelatory observations.

Ms. Ullmann's choice of prefatory quotations is apt for this tale that reveals the duplicity of the human heart, the machinations of the mind. The first quote is from German poet Rilke who, in this particular verse, utters a wish to be alone and awake in the dark. The second is from heavyweight Joe Frazier: "I don't want to knock my opponent out. I want to hit him, step away, and watch him hurt. I want his heart."

Translated from the Norwegian by award-winning translator Tiina Ninnally who brought us "Smilla's Sense of Snow," Before You Sleep is the story of an Oslo family, the Blom's, as seen through the reflections of their youngest daughter, Karin. She introduces them by saying, "Anni drank to forget. I drank to be happy. Father drank just to keep going. Grandma drank to sleep better at night. Aunt Selma drank to be even meaner than she already was."

Her mother, the irresistibly attractive Anni, "Oslo's best hairdresser......who didn't really want to be Anni at all, but somebody else entirely" and her father, a man known only as "Father" are separated. Older sister, beautiful Julie, married Aleksander in the summer of 1990. It is a doomed match for Julie as she becomes convinced of her husband's faithlessness.

Karin recalls that some of her happiest times as a child were spent going to the movies with her father. It was during these moments that he may have molded her with such instructive dictums as "A human heart isn't any bigger than this, said Father, taking his hand out of his pocket and showing me his clenched right fist. The knuckles were white. You shouldn't ask for too much..."

As she reflects, Karin's thoughts travel from Oslo today to Brooklyn in the 1930's where Anni lived as a child, the daughter of a successful costume maker. Karin also recalls her own sexual adventures, the seduction of a man to whom she was not particularly attracted. Lying, she has concluded is of import. The trick is to know how to do it, to learn which lies will be believed and which will not.

Before You Sleep closes as it began - Karin is caring for Sander, Julie's young son. "I bend over him, put my ear to his lips. Only then do I hear that everything is the way it's supposed to be. Everything is fine. Sander is breathing. He's asleep now. He sleeps the whole night. Here, next to me."

Now a journalist in Oslo, Ms. Ullmann's future is bright if predicated only on the inventiveness and luminosity of her first novel.