Doctor Glas: A Novel

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

Hjalmar Söderberg (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. Söderberg's novels include Confusions, Martin Birck's Youth, and The Serious Game; Doctor Glas is regarded as his masterpiece.