The Director | Granta

  • Published: 01/11/2008
  • ISBN: 9781846270482
  • 129x20mm
  • 96 pages

The Director

Alexander Ahndoril

The Director is Ingmar Bergman; the time is 1961; and the setting is the shooting of Winter Light, a film about how his life would have been had he followed his father’s wishes and become a priest. As actors and crew gather to film this alternative destiny, Bergman tries to draw his father into the process, but quickly finds himself plunged back into the emotions of his childhood – both terrorized by his brutal and dominating father, and desperately longing for his approval – and reality gradually begins to crack and crumble, tipping him into a world of false memories and dangerous fantasies. Compelling and breathtakingly original, The Director mixes biographical fact with a wild kaleidoscopic imagination to reveal the boy and the man behind the great film-maker.

What a great read! The writer seduced me into his world in much the same mesmerising way that Bergman might do in one of his films. A wonderful novel

Jeremy Irons

Fascinating ... an honest, empathetic and respectful account of creativity, flowing from a unique mind to affect other people's lives, made with Bergmanesque spareness and attention to detail, a vivid tribute to the Shakespeare of our age.

Paul Binding, Independent on Sunday

A Scandinavian version of Fellini's Eight and a Half, the novel melts the imagined and remembered. It also catches the physical atmosphere of Sweden, both warming and chill - like Bergman's relationships.

Martin Hoyle, Financial Times

The Author

Alexander Ahndoril is a Swedish novelist and playwright. His best-selling novel, Regissören (2006), about the film maker Ingmar Bergman, was published in translation by Granta as The Director in 2008. In 2009, Ahndoril was longlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

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