The Best Intentions. This item is unavailable.The Best Intentions

In the acclaimed filmmaker's fictional account of his parents' tormented courtship, Henrik, a poor divinity student, and Anna, the pampered daughter of a bourgeois family face family objections to their love. 25,000 first printing.

YA-Bergman uses old family photographs to provide visual images as he sets out to portray his parents' stormy love affair and life together as he imagines them. He infuses the tale with profound sympathy for all characters involved, switching from dialogue in which the players reveal themselves, to his own asides, in which he draws both characters and readers offstage to explain the tone he is looking for in an evolving scene. The director's voice and the "You are there" quality add to the originality of the book without slowing its pace. YAs will enjoy this story for its plot and characterization, and will learn from it about converting photographic and dramatic action into fiction.
Margaret Nolan, W.T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Written in the form of a screenplay with expanded stage directions, this openly personal first novel meditates on the youth of the noted Swedish director's parents, their courtship and the early years of their marriage. (It was the basis for a 1992 film directed by Billie August.) The tale begins in 1909, when impoverished divinity student Henrik Bergman (Ingmar's father) refuses a request to visit the bedside of his dying grandmother because her husband had disowned his father. The issues raised in this scene--money, class, forgiveness, personal responsibility--turn out to be central in Henrik's later courtship of Anna Akerblom, daughter of a middle-class couple. The drama has two acts: in the first, Anna's mother, with the best intentions, tries but fails to keep the lovers apart; in the second, Henrik, who condemned his grandmother for never standing up to her husband, must deal with a wife who constantly stands up to him. In a narrative that has the feel of an expansive Ibsen play, Bergman's presence is pervasive without being intrusive; he sets the scene, compares his real parents to the characters he has created, then lets the dialogue tell the story. A sad, honest, rewarding book.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Who exactly are our parents? That question underlies this first novel by the renowned Swedish film director ( The Seventh Seal , 1956; The Virgin Spring , 1959; Cries and Whispers , 1972), who mused over albums and letters to re-create the often vexed courtship and first years of marriage between his clergyman father and nurse mother during the second decade of the century. He successfully incorporates dialog and expository bridges, offering this explanation of the writing process: "Sometimes it attaches great importance to a few lines in a letter. Suddenly it wishes to fantasize over fragments that appear out of the dim waters of time." Bergman's characters are sometimes enigmatic, occasionally irritating, and always compelling, with emotions fanned or restrained by pleasant summers and harsh Scandinavian winters. While providing grist for the mill of film scholars, the novel stands on its own as an affecting portrait. The current motion picture--the script for which was written by Bille August, not Bergman--won the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992. For large fiction and film collections.
- Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, Pa.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.