Doctor Glas - Hjalmar Sderberg

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-sicle 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 Eugnie 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