First person singular: Ferrante and Tokarczuk

Here are two novels in which the narrators are so careful with their words that the response must be terse too - and elliptical, too, in order to avoid any spoilers.

The Lost Daughter is the last of Elena Ferrante's (relatively) early works I've read this year, since I finished the great Neapolitan quartet in hospital in early January and then moved on to the most haunting of the early three, The Days of Abandonment.

I was quick to buy a copy of Olga Tokarczuk's 2009 masterpiece Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead not after she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but because I'd read that demiTory weirdo Rory Stewart had remarked on seeing someone reading it on the tube, and, clearly knowing nothing of its reputation, objected to the odd title (so much for being well briefed).

The title comes from Blake, one of the leitmotif preoccupations of animal-loving hillside dweller Mrs. 'don't call me Janina' Dusjecsko. You're drawn into her singular way of seeing things from the very first page, and even inclined to think that many of her views must be those of the author. Until... and that's about as far as I can go here, It reads so compellingly, too, in the translation of Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who's also rendered into very lucid English Artur Domosławski's superlative biography of fellow more-than-journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, which I'm halfway through at the moment.

There's also not too much I should say about The Lost Daughter, except that it contains many of the same preoccupations as Lenù's in the tetralogy. You can't help wondering if Ferrante has kept her real identity secret because of how much she personally may have invested in her memorable tale-tellers. Here the essence is a beachscape with a mother, young daughter and doll, and how those elements trigger the narrator's memories and obsessions. How else can I describe it but as great, serious literature?

Meanwhile, the saga of Lenù and Lila continues to haunt; having reviewed the National Theatre's compromised but theatrically effective zip through the whole story for The Arts Desk, I ordered up Saverio Costanzo's TV series based on the first volume, My Brilliant Friend (the others, apparently, are to be serialised too). One episode watched so far is enough to realise that this is visual narrative right under the skin of its subject. The casting of the children, is perfect, much as I imagined them.

Linn Ullmann's Unquiet is a very different case from Ferrante's works. Ullmann calls it a novel, but it is in fact a candid, unsparing portrait of her relationship with her father, Ingmar Bergman, and to a certain extent of that with her mother, Liv. In total contrast to a dreadful, sensationalist Swedish TV documentary about the master which I gave up on halfway through - not least because the tacky music was at odds with the film clips, though chiefly because its structure was unsound, its speculations dodgy - this is a portrait told with love but also a disarming honesty, catching angles of a filial relationship in which magic plays a greater part than disenchantment. I guess the selection, the honing, is what makes it novelistic. And like all great novels, it raises more questions than it answers.

Liv-ing on Fårö

Finally put up my official thoughts about Prospero Bergman's enchanted island as one of the Arts Desk's Sunday 'letters from...'. Still, there's much more to add. Reassuring the Triestophiles among you that I haven't given up on the Winckelmann or James Joyce entries I promised, I'd better stagger the Fårö afterthoughts too. Note that for once I've bothered with the accents: it really is important to see that it might be pronounced 'Four-er'.

Liv Ullmann came across as a warm and spontaneous human being, crying with a kind of bittersweet happiness about the miracle of being back for the first time since the funeral. Here's the gravestone for the burial-place Ingmar shares with his wife (no relation to the great actress who starred alongside Liv in his Autumn Sonata). It's in a quiet corner of Fårö Church, furthest from both the road and the sea, and fronted by a crazy-paving sweep expressly against the greensward surrounding the master requested.


After the question and answer session with Jannike Ahlund, Ullmann came out the back to speak to the Magnificent Eight, as one of my fellow critics dubbed us (there's my roommate Li standing next to her in the top shot. Shame it doesn't catch her bright blue eyes - there's a better head shot by the official photographer in the TAD piece). I did film her talking about how the scene with the broken glass in Persona wasn't premeditated; nor was the iconic shot of hers and Bibi's faces joining together. Both came about by accident. Stupidly, I shot the little speech in portrait format on my camera, and forgot that films, unlike stills, can't be turned round. Still, I have that little piece of history to treasure and hope we can revisit the interview proper (which was professionally filmed).

Should add just a bit more about the private cinema, too, as not all the photos I wanted could be accommodated in the TAD piece. Here's Liv and Ingmar's daughter Linn talking outside it about her childhood, and how they'd all meet at 3pm and sit on the bench by which she's standing:


And, since she recalled the premiere screening of The Magic Flute - which was edited in the room above the 15-seater, here's the only adornment in the cinema, which seems so modern (and in fact was opened to a very select public when we were there for the first time). It's a rather marvellous tapestry by Anita Grede, depicting characters from the opera against the background of Fårö scenes.


Some of the film's people, especially the Queen of the Night, the Three Ladies and Monostatos, are represented as we see them in the film. But there, of course, is Bergman himself playing Sarastro with the magic flute.


I've just begun Linn's novel A Blessed Child, by the way, partly based on her relationship with her father and the island (dimly veiled as 'Hammarsö' - Hammars is where Bergman's house is situated). It's written with a poetic simplicity that must be well reflected in Sarah Death's translation from the Norwegian.


And that will have to do for now. There were so many stills I wanted to use of scenes and rehearsals for the Fårö five - Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, Shame and The Passion of Anna - but since Swedish Film International demanded $200 a shot, that just wasn't possible. Next time, we'll have a look at a few places NOT associated with Ingmar on Fårö.

Bergmen

Again, apologies for the unproclaimed absence: I've been in Faro - really should start adopting the accents here, the nearest pronounciation we can get is 'Four-er' - the magic-scary Swedish island of Prospero Ingmar Bergman ever since he landed there in 1960 and decided to film Through a Glass Darkly on the coast near what would become his home.

To Four-er was invited a select 'delegation of international journalists' to observe and participate in the annual Bergman Week. And here we all are, a harmonious bunch of diverse temperaments, outside the Damba barn which served first as the studio for the interiors of Scenes from a Marriage and then became Bergman's private cinema. Can you imagine the awe and emotion of being a dozen or so spectators in the fifteen-seater, sinking into the chairs around the one with the cushion that must always be left empty - that of the Meister?

The assembled company, left to right, consists of Mike Goodridge (Screen International, London, lately the mag's LA man), Jan Brachmann (Berliner Zeitung, the chap to talk music with when film chat became a bit too arcane for me, an amateur in I hope the best sense), Gerald Peary (Boston Globe, genial old-school maker of a well-received documentary about American film critics), some creature in pink minding his head on the threshold of the sacred shrine, Satyen Bordoloi (Indo-Asian News Service, Mumbai, enthusiast and photo-taker extraordinaire), Li Hongyu (Southern Weekly, Beijing, and a tidy roommate in one of the campsite capsules they housed us in for the four days), Peter Rainer (NPR, LA, just assembling thirty years of film criticism into a book and big anecdotalist of time with the greats) and Roman Volobuev (Afisha Magazine, Moscow, brain and memory the size of a planet, chainsmoker, individualist and a former colleague of Anna Politkovskaya, of whom he had some revealing things to say).

Lest you think that the man who made About All These Women would have been sorely disappointed by the all-male clan, we did have feminine company in the shape of the smiley Kajsa Guterstam, International Project Manager of the Swedish Institute, and the fabulously informative Pia Lundberg, Head of the International Department of the Swedish Film Institute, who chose the four new Swedish films we had the privilege of seeing in advance screenings in the private cinema. There were also the very emotional and truthful Liv Ullmann, who hadn't been back to the island since Bergman's death three years ago, and the daughter she had with IB, the novelist Linn Ullmann (I'm looking forward to reading A Blessed Child, which has more than a little of the Faro flavour about it, she told us). Anyway, here Pia and Kajsa join the throng along with Trutz von Ahlefeld, another genial guide around an island he knows well.


No time to download the bulk of my own pics yet, but I must just stick in two to show the extremes of this island, so mediterranean in parts in high summer but with the potential for the ultimate bleakness, the isle of death as IB once called it. The south and west coasts are mostly like this, with viper's bugloss purple-blueing the landscape:


while the north-west coast is lined with rauks - sea stacks - and pebbly beaches with fossilised coral in the stones. They tell us Faro broke away from Africa, hard as that may be to believe, and this is the result.


All these were locations for a clutch of Bergman's most lacerating movies, but I'd better save all that for my Arts Desk piece, due for next Sunday. Now I must get the tenth and last of my Meistersinger classes in shape. We'll whizz through the final revels in an hour because before that Richard Jones is coming to talk. Hope he's just as pleased as I am to know that in the listening room cum study of Bergman's home at Hammars is the (I think) Knappertsbusch recording.


Inevitably an important work for a creator who knew that nothing vital comes about without a touch of Wahn to prompt it.