KARIN <i> by Margareta Bergman (St. Martin’s Press: $16.95; 253 pp.) </i>

Karin is a middle-aged, once-beautiful Swedish expatriate whose obtuse, alcoholic English husband has cut his throat after the failure of a business deal--a rapacious development scheme in Ethiopia that, incidentally, caused the deaths of thousands of nomads. Just before that, their anorexic daughter drowned herself. Alone in a cottage on the Channel coast, near the scene of the latter tragedy, Karin grieves, rages and summons up the ghosts of her youth in Stockholm. What a smorgasbord of suffering that was, too! Despite misgivings, she married and left Sweden to escape her inheritance of guilt and sexual repression, her ineffectual father, her neurotic mother, her half-mad sister (another suicide)--in short, the stuff of which Ingmar Bergman movies are made; only to find that the pain of the generations is a movable feast.

Margareta Bergman is Ingmar’s sister, and in “Karin,” the first of her novels to be translated into English, she makes no bones about it. Karin’s parents express admiration for Bergman films, and Karin herself is a former schoolmate of--Margareta Bergman, who, she says, “drooped about the place in crummy old-fashioned clothes. . . . Looked as if she lived on air and romantic poetry.” This attempt at self-mockery fails to win us. It’s excessive, like much else about the novel: its unbroken string of catastrophes, its melodrama-swollen prose. Paul Britten Austin’s translation (in which Swedish peasant housemaids speak Cockney) doesn’t help, but only Bergman is to blame for passages such as this:

“In my heart is an empty room, whose furniture is covered over in white dustsheets and whose curtainless windows, streaked by a rain of falling tears, look out on a Garden of Eternal Grief, where only cypresses grow and somber flowers black and white or silver-gray. In that room is a mute silence, occasionally broken by a sob, or a shrill inconsolable cry of pain. . . .”

Still, the reader needn’t mourn as much as Karin. Underneath the surface bathos is a story told with intelligence and feeling--just as, through the fog of Karin’s present (enlivened with nasty digs at the British upper classes) it’s the scenes in postwar Sweden that loom solid and real. In a snug but drafty world of chamber pots and flower boxes, terrifying sermons and old maids with long-stifled romantic longings, Margareta Bergman, like her brother, has sunk her roots and found a fertile source of art.