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Before You Sleep

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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 and writer in Oslo, Ms. Ullmann's bright future was foretold if based only on the inventiveness and luminosity of her first novel.

- Gail Cooke