Shyness and Dignity

Description

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. 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.

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.

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