On a dare, photographer Robert Capa slips a note under actress Ingrid Bergman's hotel room door, asking her out to dinner--and is astonished when she accepts. So begins Chris Greenhalgh's Seducing Ingrid Bergman, a fictional version of a real-life reckless but tantalizing relationship set against the backdrop of post-war Paris and Hollywood. The two appear at first to be an odd match: Capa, an outwardly lighthearted man who enjoys reading books in the bathtub and frequenting racetracks, and Bergman, a reserved and hesitant film star whose silence conceals a marriage on the rocks and a deep insecurity about her work. Yet the pair managed to keep their relationship secret from Bergman's husband and children for several years.
Appropriately, given Capa's profession, the story is told in scenes that alternate between Capa's first-person point of view and third-person descriptions of Bergman. The result is a story that positions the reader in the same place as the photographer. As audiences did during Bergman's life, readers of Seducing Ingrid Bergman find themselves looking at her--but, thanks to Greenhalgh's storytelling, they'll see an Ingrid Bergman those audiences didn't view on the silver screen.
Seducing Ingrid Bergman allows imagination to fill in the gaps history leaves behind, developing both Capa's and Bergman's characters in a richly detailed narrative that shades into the lyric, offering an intense emotional pull without ever becoming sentimental. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket