Sunday's Children Book

Children born on Sunday are said to have special gifts of sensitivity, imagination, and clairvoyance, including the ability to see goblins and ghosts. The protagonist of this touching and deeply affecting novel is a young boy named Pu, a Sunday's child. Pu is eight and his brother Dag ten when their mother rents Pastor Dahlberg's ramshackle house for the summer. It is the first summer the family has not stayed with their grandmother in her comfortable home a few miles away, but Pu's father has let it be known that if he is to join them for vacation, it will have to be in a house of their own. Sunday's Children is the story of that summer, of the magical landscape and the people who pass through it: Pu's overbearing grandmother, his drunken uncle, the beautiful tutor, his terrorizing brother, and his feuding parents. Pu hates his brother's endless teasing, enjoys holding his baby sister and playing with trains, adores his mother, worships yet fears his father. But Pu also thinks about death, dwells on the strange stories of ghosts the servant girls tell, and broods about the painful arguments between his parents. As the novel opens, Pu, his heart full of high expectations, is on his way to the railroad station to meet his father. But much to Pu's chagrin, when his father arrives, he is restless, absent-minded, and melancholy. They take a trip together, a journey that at times brings them closer but ultimately deepens the growing darkness between them. The author enriches the reader's sense of that relationship through a series of "flashbacks to the future," in which the protagonist visits his ill and dying father in later years. As a child Pu approached his father with complete adoration. As an adult, with distance, he brought anger. But in the end he brings understanding. In his review of the film adapted from Bergman's novel, Vincent Canby called it "a gorgeous, richly poignant memoir, so full of mirrors, so magically placed, that [it] manages to reflect the f

Publishers Weekly

The renowned film director's second autobiographical novel (after Best Intentions ) is a moving, if misguided, bit of whimsy that continues the story of his parents' marriage. The Bergman household in rural Sweden is comprised of the reproving and often absent pastor Erik; his beautiful, distant wife Karin; their preteen terror Dag; eight-year-old Ingmar, affectionately known as ``Pu''; four-year-old Lillian; and various maids. The book chronicles an especially trying time for them all as Karin threatens to leave Erik and take the children with her. Assorted uncles and aunts drift through the text, but the focus remains Pu's troubled relationship with his tyrannical father--both of them, by virtue of having been born on Sunday, are declared clairvoyant by the kitchen staff. Though much of the story is enjoyable, the meaty resolutions Bergman tries to hang on the skeletal plot seem inappropriate. His slavish fascination with the details of his early childhood tend to slow down the narrative, and one can't help but wonder what the author might do if he turned his precise writing and sharp eye to some subject other than himself. A movie version of Sunday's Children is slated for release in late April. (Mar.)