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Shyness and Dignity

Shyness and Dignity
By Dag Solstad

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Product Description

An Ibsen scholar falls desperately out of society—publication coinciding with Ibsen's 100th anniversary celebrations In front of him, twenty-nine young men and women about the age of eighteen who looked at him and returned his greeting. He asked them to take out their school edition of The Wild Duck. He was once more struck by their hostile attitude toward him. But it couldn’t be helped, he had a task to perform and was going through with it. It was from them as a group that he sensed that massive dislike sent forth by their bodies. Individually they could be very pleasant, but together, positioned like now, at their desks, they constituted a structural enmity, directed at him and all that he stood for.
Elias Rukla begins yet another day under the leaden Oslo sky. At the high school where he teaches, a novel insight into Ibsen’s The Wild Duck grips him with a passion so intense that he barely notices the disinterest of his students. After the lesson, when a broken umbrella provokes an unpredictable rage, he barely notices
the students’ intense curiosity. He soon realizes, however, that this day will be the decisive day of his life.  Dag Solstad, praised in Norway as one of the most innovative novelists of his generation, offers an intricate and richly drawn portrait of a man who feels irrevocably alienated from contemporary culture, politics, and, ultimately, humanity.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #943458 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-07-25
  • Released on: 2006-07-25
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 112 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
An Oslo academic who came of age in the way-out '60s shrinks back from the glaring modern age in Norwegian novelist and playwright Solstad's remarkably nuanced novel, his first to be translated into English. Elias Rukla, described in this stiff translation as "a rather sottish senior master in his fifties with a wife who had spread out a bit too much," is fed up after 25 years of teaching Ibsen's Wild Duck to increasingly apathetic 19-year-olds at Oslo's Fagerborg Secondary School. A breakdown following an incident with an umbrella and verbally abusing a student makes Elias recognize he has become obsolete. Accompanied by rueful thoughts of his aging but once beautiful wife, Eva Linde, the drama of Elias's life unfolds, from the memory of his friendship with Eva's first husband, the intellectual dynamo and Marxist Johan Corneliussen. Inseparable mates at university, the men engaged in vigorous discussions about philosophy and literature that stretched over days and numerous parties. But Johan inexplicably left for New York to join the capitalist quagmire he always railed against, abandoning Eva and their young child, a betrayal from which Elias never recovers. With sublime restraint and subtle modulation, Solstad conveys an entire age of sorrow and loss. (Aug.)
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Review
Solstad's writing is fantastic, with sentence structures ranging from Hemingway...to Faulkner. -- Emerging Writers Network

With sublime restraint and subtle modulation, Solstad conveys an entire age of sorrow and loss. -- Publisher's Weekly

About the Author

Dag Solstad, a novelist and playwright, has won numerous prizes for his writing throughout Europe, including the prestigious Nordic Prize for Literature. This is the first English translation of his work. Solstad lives in both Oslo, Norway, and Berlin, Germany.

Customer Reviews

Dag Shames American Authors5
Shyness & Dignity reminded me of several of my favorite authors: Saul Bellow, especially "Seize the Day," with its portrayal of an irrevocable moment of existential dread, Samuel Beckett for its painstaking examination of the world in so absurdly rational a way as to bring rationality into question, and Knut Hamsun, especially Hunger, in its presentation of consciousness, so vivid that it can be said that consciousness itself is the hero. It's a novel so fresh and real that it puts the pallid exercises of contemporary American academic "authors" to shame. Let's hope more Dag Solstad gets published!

Norwegian Angst -- Big Time3
What is it about these writers, that they're so sad and disillusioned? A high school teacher goes over the edge and would like to take everyone with him except that it can't be done in this culture? In Olso you check out singularly begging the question of the national mentality. Stream of consciousness, I suppose it has to be described, well-wrought, keeping the reader in the depressed teacher's head the whole time, until the desolation finally resolves. Is there no hope in the Norland?