Mail
PO Box 3159, SE-103 63
Stockholm, Sweden
Visiting Address
Sveavägen 56, Stockholm
Sweden
Phone
+46 8 696 89 10
E-mail
info@bonniergroupagency.se |
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| Category:
Fiction/General
| Publication:
2006 Autumn
| Rights sold:
Czech/Lidové noviny
Danish/Athene Aschehoug
Dutch/De Geus
English-UK/Portobello Books
Estonian/Eesti Päevaleht
Hungarian/Europa
Italian/Aìsara
Norwegian/Piratforlaget
Polish/slowo/obraz terytoria
Russian/Text
Turkish/Pegasus
| Agent:
Susanne Widén
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| Alexander Ahndoril (Author) |
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| Swedish title: Regissören |
With love and sensuality Alexander Ahndoril coaxes a novel to materialise out of the early 1960's of reality, a time which had such a great impact on so many of our modern values and our outlook on life.
The Director is a sensual and unobtrusive homage to art, to love and to the many little lies, which all together make up the truth.
The Director is set in Sweden in the early 1960's - in a country actively advocating modernity and international cooperation, while at the same time wrestling with a rigid Lutheran heritage and provincial narrow-sightedness. At the very core of this conflict is Ingmar Bergman.
Tentatively Ingmar starts working on the movie Winter Light, about the priest who no longer finds it possible to believe.Once and for all he needs to explain to his parents why he simply could not become a priest, like his father.
In the beginning everything seems to go wrong. Stubbornly the father refuses to even read the manuscript. It takes constant lies to keep both marriage and work going. The team grumbles, there are threats from the production company, and Ingmar fears that this will be his most boring movie ever.
The Director is a novel about the shooting of a movie, playful and mildly surrealistic in a way resembling Being John Malkovich or Fellini's 8 1/2.
Step by step the real motif of the novel is unveiled: how we sometimes swindle ourselves to reach the truth. Alexander Ahndoril lets magical realism softly touch the most Swedish icon of all. The reality around Ingmar Bergman is at the same time transmittable and true to facts - like the lens of a camera.
Reviews:
"It is a tale of a father and a son, and of the wounds they incessantly inflict upon one another. It is a tale of Art as the blind and hobbling road to reconciliation. The end of the novel, as the fragments of memories grow denser around the finishing of the filming, is extremely touching in its naked exactitude.
On the other side of the scratched camera lens the people in the story are moving. They talk to each other with words they have been given. They are living the lives, which have been imposed on them. We can see them. We cannot judge them. They simply do what they have to do. It is so beautiful it makes your heart ache."
(Sydsvenskan)
"The real subject of The Director is how the boundaries between life and fiction are dissolved - by the creator himself, who recklessly subordinates everything and everyone to his creation, but also by the artful language in its own right. When this language takes the lead, what we call life and what we call fiction can no longer be separate. Many have had the same idea, Strindberg for example, in A Dream Play, but very few have realised it with such merriness and with such a delightful twist, chiselled it out with such pleasure as Ahndoril. Is The Director a satire or an homage, a parricide in the name of art or a loveletter? It is, of couse, both. And that is was makes it so rich."
(Svenska Dagbladet)
"The Director is a seriously entertaining pageturner about a father and a son, about dream and reality, art and everyday life. It is not only the scandalous novel of this autumn, but also one of the most outstanding books of this season."
(City)
"This novel will get a lot of attention because Ingmar is mad. But the book has such qualities that it really deserves attention. Because of the fact that it is not about Ingmar."
(GP)
"...he is a very good writer, he is above all sensitive, every nuance is worth a stroke of the brush."
(Dagens Nyheter)
"Ahndoril has written a strong novel, the enjambments of the settings and the shiftings of time making it exciting. And in addition to that, the colourful rendering of the milieu is poetic. Don't believe Bergman when he says that this book is shit. He is probably mad mostly because he didn't get to direct Ahndoril while he was writing this novel."
(Dala-Demokraten)
"...a true suspense novel."
(Länstidningen)
"Here we find respect for Bergman, the person, as well as for the novel as a work of literature, a very skilful balancing."
(Kristianstadsbladet)
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