Shyness and Dignity

Description

A profoundly compelling story about a life in crisis from the critically acclaimed and prize-winning Norwegian novelist, Dag Solstad. Nothing in Elias' measured life, in his whole career as a teacher of literature, in his marriage to the 'indescribably beautiful' Eva, foreshadowed the events of that apparently ordinary day. He makes sure he has his headache pills and leaves for work as he has done every morning for the past twenty-five years. He is only too familiar with his pupils' hostile attitude both to his lectures and to himself, but today he feels their impatience, their oafishness, more painfully than ever before and, after their ritually dismissive and bored response to his passionate lecture on Ibsen's The Wild Duck, he reaches a point of crisis. Shyness and Dignity is the story of a man's awakening to a world that no longer recongises what he has always stood for or his talent. Dag Solstad is Norway's leading author, an icon among Scandinavian writers and a leading figure of the political left. This novel, in Sverre Lyngstad's fine translation, is one of Solstad's major works.

Dag Solstad is one of Norway's leading contemporary authors. His work has consistently won critical acclaim and he is the only author to have received the Norwegian Literary Critics' Award three times. All three of his novels available in English have been listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize- Shyness and Dignity was shortlisted in 2007 and Novel 11, Book 18 and Professor Andersen's Night were longlisted for the 2009 and 2012 prizes respectively.

He's a kind of surrealistic writer, very strange novels. I think that's serious literature -- Haruki Murakami I find him an utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer. For me, 2015 was The Year of Solstad -- James Wood * New Yorker * Dag Solstad is an unflinching explorer of the plight of educated humankind in the face of the inexplicable, whose artistry matches his ambitious theme -- Paul Binding * Independent * One for the grumpy old men * Scotland on Sunday * [A] compact and layered book... Solstad has a revered role in Norway as the chronicler of his country's changing times -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *