Karin

In her first novel published in English, established Swedish novelist Bergman--sister of the renowned film director--tells a revealing transgenera tional family saga of psychic injury and bewildering suffering. In the intense, vivid, sometimes painfully disturbing stream-of-consciousness of the narrator--middle-aged, once-beautiful Karin--this narrative traces backwards and forwards in time, its starting point the bleak, modern English seafront bungalow of Karin's anorectic daughter who drowned herself on her wedding night. Gradually the reader divines how Karin and her family have repeated the patterns of their Swedish forebears, despite Karin's escapist marriage to an Englishman and move to his country. Bergman's novel resembles her brother's work in terms of its revelatory cinematographic images and brooding, angst-laden confrontation with emotional repression and psychic sickliness. Yet this is a complex psychological work with a distinctive voice in its own right and is an absorbing description of traditional Swedish culture. (Aug.)