A masterpiece of enduring power, Doctor Glas confronts 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-siècle 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 Eugénie 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
“Splendid. . . . Söderberg [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
