Shyness And Dignity

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.

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.

Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

Vorwort
A profoundly compelling story about a life in crisis from the critically acclaimed and prize-winning Norwegian novelist, Dag Solstad.

Autorentext

Dag Solstad is one of Norway's leading and most celebrated contemporary writers. Solstad has won many Norwegian and international awards, most recently the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize in 2017, and is the only author to have won the Norwegian Critics Prize three times. All three of his novels already published in English - Shyness and Dignity, Novel 11, Book 18 and Professor Andersen's Night - have been listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.