Doctor Glas: A Novel

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The haunting tale of Doctor Glas takes place in Stockholm during the closing years of the 1800s. A searing masterwork of Northern European literature. A masterpiece of enduring power,Doctor Glasconfronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.With an introduction by Margaret Atwood. Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-si cle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man besieged by obsession. Lonely and introspective, Doctor Glas has long felt an instinctive hostility toward the odious local minister. So when the minister's beautiful wife complains of her husband's oppressive sexual attentions, Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder. "Imagine the classic nineteenth-century drama featuring a tyrannical older man, his hapless daughter or young wife, and her caddish suitor, as in Balzac's Eugenie Grandet and Henry James's Washington Square, this time conjured up by a sensibility akin to Strindberg's and Ingmar Bergman's-and you begin to have an idea of the force and candor of this searing masterwork of Nothern European literature. The retrieval of Doctor Glas in English is a bracing gift to hungry readers."-Susan Sontag

Reviews

Splendid. . . . Sderberg [is] a marvellous writer. The New Yorker

[Doctor Glas] not only sketches the light and shadows of its time, but maps territory still being explored by the writers of today. It is a volcano, shaking, about to erupt. The New York Times Book Review

Elegant, vigorous, and tightly-knit. . . . One of those marvellous books that appears as fresh and vivid now as on the day it was published. . . . It occurs on the cusp of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, but it opens doors the novel has been opening ever since. Margaret Atwood, from the Introduction

"Imagine the classic nineteenth century drama featuring a tyrannical older man, his hapless daughter or young wife, and her caddish suitor, as in Balzac's Eugenie Grandet and Henry James's Washington Square, this time conjured up by a sensibility akin to Strindberg's and Ingmar Bergman's--and you begin to have an idea of the force and candor of this searing masterwork of Northern European literature. The retrieval of Doctor Glas in English is a bracing gift to hungry readers." Susan Sontag

Author Bio

Hjalmar S derberg (1869-1941) was one of the most distinguished of Scandinavian novelists. He was born and raised in Stockholm and spent the last twenty-five years of his life in Copenhagen. After working as a civil servant, he turned to journalism and eventually devoted himself full-time to a literary career. In addition to novels he wrote short stories and plays as well as literary criticism and philosophical works about religion. He has been praised for his fictional vignettes of Stockholm life and for being a forerunner in the use of psychoanalytic theory and stream-of-consciousness in his fiction. S derberg's novels includeConfusions, Martin Birck's Youth, andThe Serious Game;Doctor Glasis regarded as his masterpiece.