Shyness And Dignity by Dag Solstad
Nothing about Elias’ logical life, his entire career as a literature professor, or his marriage to the “indescribably gorgeous” Eva foretold the events of that day, which appeared to be a typical one. As he has done every morning for the past 25 years, he makes sure he has his headache medication before heading to work.
He is all too familiar with his students’ hostile attitudes toward both his lectures and himself, but today he feels their impatience and oafishness more keenly than ever before. As a result, he reaches a crisis point after they responded ritualistically dismissively and bored to his passionate lecture.
Shyness And Dignity by Dag Solstad
4 used from $13.01
Free shipping
Amazon.com
Elias Rukla, a senior high school teacher of Norwegian literature, is confronted with issues regarding his responsibility to convey national self-understanding and identity to the generation of pupils he is instructing in the opening scene of the novella. This theme’s protracted introduction develops rising underlying feelings of futility and inadequacy as well as the perception of his contribution’s irrelevance; it culminates in a breakdown event in the schoolyard. From that point on, Rukla wanders the streets of Oslo contemplating on and looking back on his past experiences, gradually developing a sensation of being removed from the centre of his own personal life as well as the cultural moment in his native land and the West.
In his thoughts, he discusses his contemporaries and how they handled the difficulties of living at a time when, as members of an educated but ageing minority, they either steadily retreated from the majority culture or completely fled their surroundings. In the latter instance, Johan Corneliussen, a Marxist friend and future Kant scholar endowed with prodigious vitality and a love of life, rejects an honorary fellowship to Heidelberg and flees to America, where, as a Marxist, he is able to understand capitalism better than anyone and to enter subversively into a new cultural role, avoiding the insignificance to which he saw himself destined.
Rukla is given the responsibility of carrying on the Norwegian destiny both literally and metaphorically by Corneliussen. As a persona, Rukla is convincing, as is his understanding of his “insignificance,” which he is able to associate with the fate of the person who, like him in the 20th century, was crushed by devastating wars and extreme ideologies, even in the small, neutral nation of Norway, thanks to his readings in history and literature. The novel holds our attention with its stark clarity of self-reflection and sense of inevitableness.
