Doctor Glas

A masterpiece of enduring power&#160;<i>Doctor Glas&#160;</i>confronts a chilling moral quandary with gripping intensity.&#160;With an introduction by Margaret Atwood.<br><br>Stark brooding and enormously controversial when first published in 1905 this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-si&#232;cle 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&#146;s beautiful wife complains of her husband&#146;s oppressive sexual attentions Doctor Glas finds himself contemplating murder.&#160;<br><br>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 <i>Eug&#233;nie Grandet</i> and Henry James's <i>Washington Square</i> this time conjured up by a sensibility akin to Strindberg's and Ingmar Bergman's&#151;and you begin to have an idea of the force and candor of this searing masterwork of Nothern European literature. The retrieval of <i>Doctor Glas</i> in English is a bracing gift to hungry readers.&#160;&#151;Susan Sontag