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.
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HE WAS A RATHER sottish senior master in his fifties, with a wife who had spread out a bit too much and with whom he had breakfast every morning.
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(Vintage Digital, 31 August 2021, e-book, 162 pages, bought from AmazonKindle, translated by Sverre Lyngstad)
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I bought Shyness and Dignity because I'm reading all the books in the Vintage Editions series. I'd never heard of the author or this book before. I've enjoyed other books in the series, but this was a total disappointment and waste of money. I didn't even finish it. I couldn't get into it all. I didn't find anything remotely interesting in it. There are no chapter breaks so the whole book is 162 rambling pages where it is very difficult to find a natural point to pause. I don't like feeling railroaded to read a book in one setting especially one as dull as this one. I don't really know what the book is about as it was so rambling and tedious. I gave up halfway through. What a piece of garbage.
