“My parents spent their whole life telling stories,” says Norway’s Linn Ullmann, daughter of director Ingmar Bergman and actress/director Liv Ullmann.
Nevertheless, the NYU grad says, the principal storyteller in the family was her grandmother, a bookseller who gave Linn stacks of books each week.
“She said if I felt lonely or sad, reading would help,” Ullmann says. “When I was working on ‘The Cold Song,’ she was often there in the room with me, whispering, editing, pressing for precision. Sometimes I had to remind her that she’s dead and that she had to leave me alone.”
Perhaps her grandmother was right to press her: “The Cold Song,” Ullmann’s fifth novel, is a gem: part thriller and wholly, hauntingly beautiful.
Here’s what’s in this writer’s library:
The Woman Upstairs
by Claire Messud
The narrator’s name is Nora, and like Ibsen’s Nora in “A Doll’s House,” she keeps waiting for a something life-changing to happen, and in the process puts herself in a very specific kind of emotional danger. It’s a story about love, anger, sadness, humiliation, perception and delusion. It crept up on me and now I want everyone I know to read it.
Swann’s Way
by Marcel Proust
Last year I texted a few friends and suggested we start a Proust reading group. Six weeks later, 10 of us met for tea and madeleines to discuss this first volume of “Remembrance of Things Past.” I chose the English translation by Lydia Davis. She’s the kind of author you read if you want to sharpen your ability to be precise.
My Struggle
by Karl Ove Knausgard
It’s almost impossible to talk about contemporary Norwegian literature without mentioning this six-volume, 3,659-page autobiographical novel. How far can you go when drawing on your own life? I wonder if it had been written by a woman. She probably would have been kicked out of the country for megalomania. (Hopefully, I’m wrong.)
Levels of Life
by Julian Barnes
One of the most powerful books I’ve read about grief, memory, love and perspective. The center of the book deals with the death of the author’s wife. When my father died, I felt as if I didn’t remember anything at all — he had so many other wives and children. This is a book I wish he and I could have talked about.