This is tough, because on the one hand I did enjoy it and very much was moved by it, and on the other hand I think Bergman crossed some supreme boundary out of art and into something really quite obscene.

I don't think Bergman had a right to fictionalise his mother like this. I think it was one thing to write a love story in The Best Intentions that was effectively a prologue to his own life, and one thing to write Sunday's Children from his own perspective which he is perfectly entitled to as some small memoir. But to write a series of - fictional - deeply personal passages, putting words in his dead mother's mouth, and really... attaching strings to her corpse to make her his own marionette... He talks about his father's childish possessiveness yet I wonder whether Bergman ever paused for thought on how he used his own power as writer to possess her on a level his father could never dream of?

Bergman in his work returns time and time again to the image of the magic lantern - they feature in his films, he named his autobiography after it. Yet if we take that object, the artifice that allows image to be possessed by a pure light to create profound illuminated scene, some dream... that is the boundary Bergman has crossed. He has with this not created a series of images to shine a light of artistry through and make some reality, he has drawn on the wall itself. By so editorialising his mother he has stolen some part of the process and left it, without that magical artifice, a spotlight on his own daubings.

As said, this isn't a bad book, but it is beneath Bergman, when you look at really, who he was, what he produced, and what his philosophy was. Bergman writing about his parents using artifice got us Fanny and Alexander, Winter Light, et al. Is it arrogance or laziness to cut the artifice out and expect the same level of art? The magician who thinks they no longer need the misdirection or the illusion.

(written April 20th 2022)

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