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. A masterpiece of enduring power, Doctor Glas confronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.
"Doctor Glas is beautifully balanced, rich, coherent, and free." - Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books
"Written in a world before the two world wars, the novel has an icy wind in it, a sense of weeding the world so that only the strongest and loveliest can live. Soderberg offers both a moral and a roadmap. These days, that's a fairly distasteful combination." - Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
"A brief, strange book, it not only sketches the light and shadow of its time, but maps territory still being explored by the writers of today. It is a volcano, shaking, about to erupt." - Adrian Mitchell, The New York Times Book Review
"Even the Swedes were dismayed by Soderberg's grim-grey novel when it was published in 1910, but today it is recognized as a Scandinavian masterpiece." - Time
"This is a moving little book. (...) It is in the form of a journal, written by the doctor, and conveys with powerful economy the close, confined environment, and the articulate despair of a man who has missed love, let alone marriage." - Times Literary Supplement
"Glas himself is a caricature of Scando-Nietzschean bluster. (...) When one reads the novel from the perspective of a new century, what is particularly striking is the way Glas's conscience seems haunted, proleptically, by Sweden's troubles of the past hundred years. " - Paddy Bullard, Times Literary Supplement
“First published in 1905, Doctor Glas is considered to be Swedish novelist Hjalmar Soderberg'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, . . . offers the voyeuristic thrill of reading over the doctor's shoulder as he wrestles with his conscience.”;mdash;Publishers Weekly
“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
"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
