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.