Private Confessions

It's like reading a script for a masterpiece movie. Great book, but read it only, for full enjoyment, if you are inventive enough to do the film of the book inside your head. If you're not that kind of reader, it's still an excelent book, but you may be missing a great deal of it.

This book is fragrant with familiar Bergman film images...icy black water; musty country homes with overstuffed furniture; well-ordered lives and well-ordered people quietly coming apart in a particularly polite Scandanavian manner. It makes one thing clear - the Bergman leitmotif, characters at once overcome but distant from themselves - simultaneously subjects and objects - is no artifact of his cinematic technique. He depicts his interiors much as we might imagine them from his exteriors. And as in film, images of nature represent the soul.Read this book. It will haunt you. It most probably will not alter your conclusions about love- but it will alter the way you think about the subject. It goes beyond easy categories of tragedy (although it is certainly that). It depicts the human condition as an imprisonment so tortuous, so hopeless, so inherently perverse, that it somehow becomes sublime. Misery as meditation. It will haunt you.