Doctor Glas
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in 1905, Doctor Glas is considered to be Swedish novelist Hjalmar S derberg's masterpiece. The beautiful young wife of the repellant Reverend Gregorius confides to Glas that her sex life is making her miserable and begs for his help. Smitten with her, he agrees, even though she already has another lover. He does intervene, but when it becomes clear that the Reverend will not give up his "rights," Glas begins planning his murder. Arranged in the form of a journal, this fascinating, deeply moral (yet never moralizing) novel, trans. by Paul Britten Austin, offers the voyeuristic thrill of reading over the doctor's shoulder as he wrestles with his conscience.
