The young woman standing at hotel reception is small - petite, one might say. Yet her elfin face, with its elfin helmet of fair hair, is transfigured from elfin-cute to elfin-sensual by full lips and a snub nose. Linn Ullmann is very much her mother's daughter.
Growing up the daughter of a film star can't be easy: Hollywood is littered with examples of offspring crippled by the shadow of celebrity. For Linn, Liv Ullmann was only half of her parental heritage, her father being Ingmar Bergman.
Yet from the moment we shake hands - a finger-crunching experience - it is clear that Linn, now 33, is very much her own woman. The idea that the interest shown in her first novel, Before You Sleep, might owe something to her parentage never occurred to her, and she looks bewildered when I suggest this might have caused her anxiety.
What did, however, was the fear of being hammered by the Norwegian critics. For 12 years, since her return from New York where she spent her childhood with her mother, Ullmann has been "a pretty outspoken" literary critic in Oslo, champion of post-modernism and slayer of lazy giants.
"I thought they were going to murder me. I thought, how can my first novel stand up to this enormous scrutiny that's going to come now? And I panicked."
The people who mattered had given their verdict and that was enough, she decided. "I told my publisher that we weren't going to publish and to put the lid on the whole thing." It was, she says, "a little psychotic incident", quickly dismissed given that the foreign rights had been sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair to 14 countries. (The tally now stands at an impressive 26.)
Before You Sleep tells the story of the Blom family, narrated by Karin, the youngest of three generations, a would-be seductress whose e forte is lying. The themes of this witty and wacky novel could even be said to be Bergmanesque, wrote the New York Times: "The cruelty and selfishness of the human heart; the theatrical nature of relationships, which spur the need to lie and act your way through life".
Karin's mother, Anni, is "irresistible to men", and Karin's attitude towards her oscillates between admiration and jealousy. Ullmann warns against taking Anni as a portrait of her own mother, however. "I have always been fascinated by irresistible people," she explains. "People whose mere presence and smile just creates chaos. Then there are the rest of us who have to get our way by being extremely clever."
Before You Sleep is certainly extremely clever, combining fact with fiction in a sharply observed, seamless narrative whose shifts and turns are always unexpected. Its cinematic roots are rarely far below the surface. Would she really rather be working in film? Or did the Bergman legacy weigh too heavily?
Since Linn was about 10, summer holidays have been spent with Bergman on his island with an extended family of 12 half-brothers and sisters. "My father shows a film every day at 3 p.m., and we see eight movies a week, old films, new films and after we have discussions. He built the barn and it is a cinema and he shows a movie for him and for us every day. It is heaven. I have no scruples in saying it is really heaven. "My big passion is cinema, but it's almost a frivolous passion. Whereas books are life or death. There was never an idea of going professionally into cinema.
"I love the whole idea of film, but you can do the same in a book. There's so much freedom, and you have full control, and literary fiction is the one place where you can actually bring all the other art forms in. Not only film, but music too. Music is another passion that I have. I thought very much in terms of sound and rhythm when I was writing."
She raises her arms and moves them to an imagined phrase. They are those of a dancer, elegant, fluid, precise. For many years her dream had been to become "a prima ballerina" and she attended the Juilliard School in New York until she was told she wasn't good enough to dance professionally. Dancing "as a hobby" wasn't enough, so she read English literature instead.
That year when she was 10, she discovered Margot Fonteyn was living in the same New York hotel where she, her mother and her Norwegian tutor lived for two years. "I remember sitting outside her door in the hallway and just waiting for it to open. And in the end, after days, it was actually opened - by her assistant who said `Who are you? What are you actually doing here?' I got up and ran away.
"Then somebody explained and I was allowed to go in and dance for Margot Fonteyn for five minutes. And she said, `Oh, that's very sweet', and I shuffled out again. The dancing wasn't so great but the sitting outside her closed door and almost hoping she would never open it, I will never forget.
"Because I was so in awe of that thought, that behind that door was this ballerina that I had heard so much about."
The "imagined" overlaying the "real" is something Ullmann uses to good effect. The title of the novel refers to the curious logic that comes into play before you fall asleep.
"In a dream, the absurd can seem totally logical, and I just wanted to capture that atmosphere, that state when you're very sensitive and you become more in tune to what's going on both on the inside and the outside, when everything becomes very real, when suddenly even a door can become really troubling."
With a woman who loves to lie as her central character, Ullmann found the freedom to escape from facts. "An unreliable narrator opened up different kinds of narrative. I didn't have to stay to strict realism or strict anything. There were no frontiers, really, because Karin's stories go from being true to total fantasy and they're all real, they float in and out of each other."
We talk about the suspension of disbelief. One episode in the novel ends with a man metamorphosing into a mackerel. Although many areas of the story were meticulously researched - specifically the story of the Blom grandparents, who emigrated to the US in the 1930s - Ullmann's research on fish was found wanting.
"I did a reading in the north of Norway, and people know a lot about fish there. And this one burly guy gets up and says: `I don't believe that thing about the guy turning into the mackerel'. And I say: `OK, well I can understand that.' Then he goes on: `She puts him in a bowl of fresh water. Mackerel is a salt-water fish. He'd never survive, he'd die.' He was fine with the fact that this guy would turn into a mackerel - but put him into fresh water and not sea water, that was too much."
Before you Sleep is published by Picador, price £12.99 in UK