SILENCE IN OCTOBER

Were he still directing, Ingmar Bergman might have made a memorable film from this claustrophobic and emotionally charged portrayal of a destroyed marriage and its complex emotional fallout. Veteran Danish author Grøndahl, in the first of his eleven novels to appear here, slowly, slyly builds a devastating characterization of this 1996 tale's unnamed narrator: a ruminative art historian, former cabdriver, and blasé sensualist, amoral betrayer of his wife, and—most interestingly—a passive emotional blank whose inchoate guilt feelings suggest a reluctant momentum toward a kind of religious faith. This very accomplished fiction also employs imagery drawn from cinema and theater to evoke the tactics by which its characters compulsively live: selectivity, hyperbole, and (especially) fabrication.