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Shyness and Dignity

Named best Norwegian novel of the 1990s in the Norwegian Book Club's prestigious voting 2007
Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2007
Named one of the four best books published in Spanish by the Spanish daily El Publico in 2007
Nominated for the French Femina Prize 2008.

The story about Elisas Rukla’s life, his university years, his friendship to Johan Corneliussen and his marriage to the ineffably beautiful Eva Linde, also contains a critical description of features of the social development that has taken place over the past decades. The despair that Elias Rukla needs to express, finds no listeners in a society where conversation has ceased to exist.

Click here for English sample translation

Praise for Shyness and Dignity:

"Dag Solstad’s new novel glows … Above all through the linguistic brilliance with which he renders his main character … The first fifty pages are flawlessly brilliant - I shiver with joy of reading … A lot to ponder over – a good book"
(Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm)

”The first fourtyfive pages of Shyness and Dignity are exceptional. The rest of the novel is very good, but the beginning is something completely out of the ordinary.”
(Mathieu Lindon, Libération, France)

“Through the existensial turmoil of a teacher, Dag Solstad shows how an expertly crafted language and hardhitting thinking becomes literature … The author has perfect command of both his subject and his literary devices; the language is dense, the vocabulary precise, the sentences long and the interpolated clauses numerous, but as a reader you never get lost and never feel bored. On the contrary, with pleasure and trust you allow yourself to be led through the maze of this demanding style, that often reveals a biting humour and an irony which we might be tempted to call Nordic. We are waiting for further translations.”
(Marie Klos, Le Matricule des Anges, France)

“Without division into chapters and almost without paragraphs, Solstad bombards us with words without once losing his breath. He makes Elias Rukla come alive, his inner turmoil and pathetic life, until we almost seem to be inside his head. A remarkable piece of literature.”
(Anne-Marie Genest, Le Libraire, Canada)

"SHYNESS AND DIGNITY is a journey to the end of shame, where a man’s dignity is burnt alive along the way … His life is turned upside down. It’s not pretty, it’s wild. His fall is described with an intensity that younger writers very seldomly possess ... He didn’t get the Femina prize for his astonishing novel Shyness and Dignity, but that is hardy something that Dag Solstad gives much thought to, because in his own country, Norway, he has won all the awards there is ... and he has been translated into English, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, etc. He has been a key figure on the literary scene in Ibsen’s homeland for years and years, and now that I am discovering this writer (Les Allusifs are the first to publish him in French), I can vividly imagine that he doesn’t give a damn whether he is passed over by the ladies in the Fémina jury … The elegance and the glow of Dag Solstad’s style make him one of the worthy followers of the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, the indisputable master of obsession and raging ruminations.”
(Robert Lévesque, La Presse, Canada)

"With sublime restraint and subtle modulation, Solstad conveys an entire age of sorrow and loss"
(Publishers Weekly)

“There are no dramatic scenes in Shyness and Dignity, no emotional exchanges, no dialogue, only the very occasional recorded remark to illustrate some observation about Elias’s unsatisfactory progress. Inevitably – not least because paragraphs go buttonholingly on for pages – the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard comes to mind and, for all his gentleness of manner and his humane standpoint, Solstad (who was born in 1941) shares Bernhard’s galvanic anger … Dag Solstad’s eminence in Norway is abundantly justified by this profound and courageous study of solitude in society, and despair within enviable security”
(Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement, UK)

“Solstad's writing is fantastic, with sentence structures ranging from Hemingway...to Faulkner”.
(Emerging Writers Network)

“We are dealing with a story that, in a few pages – barely 140 – equips a character in a novel with a staggering complexity and clearly elucidates Dag Solstad’s ability to manoeuvre the inside of Nordic minds, a maze where the pursuit of happiness ends in a blocked off alley.”
(Que Leer, Spain)

First published: 1994, Forlaget Oktober
Dag Solstad: Biography and bibliography

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