Gregorius

Alison McCulloch

As Margaret Atwood notes in her afterword, the borrowed-character novel has become almost a genre in its own right, but it's not an easy trick to pull off. Gregorius, in Silvester Mazzarella's translation, succeeds superbly, reprising in depth and detail the painful events of the hot Stockholm summer that set these troubled men on their collision course.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Swede Ohlsson draws a secondary character from Hjalmar Söderberg's classic Doctor Glas out to center stage, where his tragic inner life is displayed with an extraordinary depth of feeling. Pastor Gregorius is overweight, slovenly and desperate. As a priest living in turn-of-the-20th-century Stockholm, he has come to see God's gift as "the capacity for love," a love he feels he has been denied. As he goes from one small parish tragedy to the next, his ministrations feel like "a bit of convincing acting" and his overwhelming anxiety makes him feel like a fraud. But his sharpest pains come from his strained relationship with his much younger second wife and his continued failure to sire a child. Prescribed a long stay at a sanitarium to treat a heart that feels like "a mink inside [his] breast," he continues his search for authentic connections to other people, however fleeting. His gracefully rendered tides of self-loathing and hope, combined with settings at once alien and picturesque, add up to a truly intimate novel, one that deepens greatly with familiarity with Doctor Glas. Written with a deft and sensitive hand, this is a remarkable dissection of angst and spiritual unrest. (May)

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Library Journal

It is quite daunting to take a character from a classic novel and, more than a century later, try to write a new story. Faithful to the characters and plot of Hjalmar Soderberg's 1905 masterpiece, Doctor Glas, this novel is both compelling and timely, surpassing all expectations. Ohlsson fully animates the character of Reverend Gregorious, successfully portraying a complex personality with many yearnings, frailties, and disappointments. With great sensitivity and an intensely introspective narrative, he tells the pastor's side of the story, of his love and admiration for his extremely young wife, Helga, and of their many problems as well as his own personal crises. We read of Gregorius's acknowledgment of his wife's extramarital affair and of his great, unfulfilled desire to father a child. At times, events cloud his judgment, and he suffers innumerable self-doubts and anxieties, yet in the end he may be a hero. Stockholm journalist Ohlsson won the prestigious 2004 August Prize in Sweden for this first novel, beautifully written and here flawlessly translated. A fascinating book with broad appeal, particularly for anyone acquainted with Doctor Glas; highly recommended for larger libraries.
—Lisa Rohrbaugh

Kirkus Reviews

In his first English-language publication, award-winning Swedish author Ohlsson responds to Hjalmar Soderberg's 1905 classic, Doctor Glas, by taking on the voice of its villain. Soderberg's novel is narrated by a conflicted doctor who crosses ethical boundaries to help a young woman, Helga, escape her abusive husband, a cantankerous clergyman named Gregorius old enough to be her grandfather. Ultimately Doctor Glas wins the pastor's trust and poisons him, allowing Helga the freedom to pursue her lover. Ohlsson tells the story from Gregorius's perspective, creating a psychological study more than twice the length of the 1905 work. In this version, Gregorius is pathetic rather than tyrannical, and his attempts to dominate Helga sexually and emotionally are tragic stabs at reclaiming his quickly fading powers. Gregorius justifies the infatuation that began when Helga was just ten years old by expressing disappointment at his inability to have a child of his own. In what will prove to be the last summer of his life, he is candid about the infantilization caused by aging and his fear of death. When he begins to suspect that Helga has been unfaithful, his rage is rooted in his own insecurity and his fear that he will die with only God's love. Ohlsson's humanization of a great literary monster is almost Nabokovian; the genius of his novel lies in its deliberate contrast to Soderberg's original depiction of an utterly repulsive old man with no redeeming qualities. The revisionist retelling of classics has spurned some great works of modern fiction, but Doctor Glas is not exactly Beowulf or Jane Eyre; Ohlsson's careful experiment in intertexual dialogue and literary interpretation seems unlikely togarner the same level of attention-at least not from Western audiences-as Grendel (1971) or Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Will likely be lost on most American readers. Agent: Susanne Widen/Bonniers Agency