A review of Sunday’s Children - Ingmar Bergman
Sunday’s Children, Ingmar Bergman
(translated by Joan Tate)
1994, Vintage Classics
(Brief Encounters series), 2026
Described as an autobiographical novella, and until now long out of print in English in the UK, Sunday’s Children is one in a trilogy the other two titles of which remain frustratingly unavailable here. Frustrating because the first thing I wanted to do after reading it was to order the other two titles. There are currently no plans to re-publish The Best Intentions or Private Confessions here.1
From the opening sentence, the reader is transported back to a Sweden very different from today, to a time of village life and rural pursuits. There is the sweet smell of wildflower meadows and the astringency of cow-dung; there is the buzzing of fat bees among the toadflax and the distant lowing of cattle as a far-off stream train chugs along the long ago shut down railway lines that took the pastor to preach in a neighbouring parish and brought news of births and deaths and livings-in-sin from Borlänge and Falun and Leksand. And there is Pu, growing up among sometimes lovely often grotesque relatives and siblings, bewildered by much of the grown-up world but relishing the mythologies and ghost stories, the sometimes central often tangential religious observances (his father is the pastor) and coming through it to confront, much later in life, his now widowed father, as ‘two elderly gentlemen’, somehow comic.
The writing is beautiful. The characters and their stories are charming, and Joan Tate’s translation is as good as translation gets. The scene at Dufnäs railway station, described from page 13, reads (unsurprisingly) like directions for a stage set. Its calm and its detail so carefully yet so lightly observed had me making a note in the margin to re-read Lars Gustafsson’s delightful poems Sorby elegy and Ramnäs railway community seen from the north2..
The set-piece scene, towards the end of the book, when Pu reluctantly attends his father’s sermon in nearby Grånäs, is a fine literary accomplishment. It’s up there with the Christmas dinner scene in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – and if it’s not heretical to say so, somehow better. It ought to be much better known. I’m ashamed it’s taken me over seven decades to arrive at it, and am frustrated all over again that Penguin/Vintage have no plans to re-publish the other two titles in the trilogy. I’m grateful that the bookshop at Arlanda had an early copy of Sunday’s Children which is now also in bookshops here. I can’t recommend it too highly.
Stephen Keeler
York, September 2026
1 If anyone reading this has copies of either and would be prepared to let me borrow them for a week or so, I would be profoundly grateful. I can be contacted via YASS.
2 Lars Gustafsson, Selected Poems, translated by John Irons, Bloodaxe Books, 2015.
