Before You Sleep

Before You Sleep is Linn Ullmann's first novel, translated into English in 1999. Like her three later efforts, all of which I've enjoyed, it is worldly-wise and a bit strange (not too much), and filled with the kind of honesty about people and families that is all too rare in contemporary fiction. The story is unimportant; it is the characterizations that are key: of three generations of a family, split between New York and Norway. There are hidden nuggets strewn through the book, for example when Karin Blom, the narrator, says that she "read somewhere" about all the different kinds of thunder: rolling, crackling, echoing, and so on. I am quite certain that she is referring to Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, where those descriptions occur. For someone not so old, Ullmann gives the impression of have seen, read, and lived much. Being the daughter of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman seems to have served her well in becoming a novelist.