Sunday’s Child - Softcover

Bergman, Ingmar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0002713934 ISBN 13: 9780002713931

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1994

Synopsis

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 completeadoration. 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

About this title

Synopsis:

Pu was born into a stormy household. The courtship and early years of his parents' marriage are already described in "The Best Intentions". And in this novel, the eight-year-old boy is all too alert to the recurrent quarrels resounding through the thin walls of the parental bedroom.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0002713934
• ISBN 13: 9780002713931
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128