Doctor Glas

You could subtitle this book “Diary of a Madman,” except Dr. Glas is too logical and high-functioning for that. Maybe “Diary of a Sociopath,” but I’ve never come across one so genuinely charming and sympathetic. How about we just say he “has issues” because really, who doesn’t whose diary makes for such compelling reading? Glas is a thoroughly modern character (from an era when the term “modern” was just starting to be applied to a certain kind of literature) with a moral conundrum. And because he’s a step ahead of most men of his time and place (late 19th C. Stockholm), Freudian dream analysis, evolution, atheism, and women’s rights find their way into the few months worth of musings he jots down while debating with himself whether or not to take action. Elegiac, funny, epigrammatic—Dr. Glas is Hamlet or Roskolnikov in a bowler hat. This classic novella of proto-Modernism is not to be missed.