Liv Ullmann first appeared before North American film audiences in 1971 as Kristina Oskar in Jan Troell's The Emigrants, then its sequel, The New Land (1972). PBS showed the two films together, which is how I saw them -- as a ten-year-old watching in awe and horror as Kristina and her husband Karl (Max von Sydow) endured hardship as Swedish homesteaders in 19th century Minnesota.
Imagine my surprise when the next time I saw Ullmann she was starring in a 1973 musical adaptation of James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933). Gone was the mud and the grey skies of Minnesota's Chisago Lakes, and in their place, the rustic perfection of Shangri-La, where her character works as a singing schoolteacher.
A couple days ago I found a good condition Book-of-the-Month Club hardcover of Ullmann's 1977 ficto-memoir Changing (Knopf) at AA Furniture & Appliances on Kingsway and added it to a pile that included a UK paperback of Robert Blythe's Akenfield (1969) and a wooden milking stool that I will use as a side table. The New York Times was not very kind to Changing and its "chatty, childlike writing," but times have changed. Today the culture is very chatty, very childlike, which could explain why the book is experiencing a revival.
What I appreciate most about Changing, in addition to its poetic insights, is its Nordic ingenuousness (like Karl Ove Knausgård, Ullmann is Norwegian). Imagine being the Knopf publicist waiting at the airport for the author after having read this from the book's opening pages:
"The same men and women will be standing by the same exits and will exclaim the same words of welcome when they see me. People with flowers and kindness, all in a hurry to pack me into a car and drive me to some luxury hotel, where they can abandon me and go home to their own lives."
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