Physician, Kill Thyself

Doctor Glas by Hjalmer Soderberg, translated from the Swedish by Paul Britten Austin. Anchor Books. 150 pages. $12.00

The title character of Hjalmer Soderberg's 1905 novel is a virgin well past the age of 30, and for good reason. In the sleepy Swedish village where he lives, marriage is the local blight, especially for women. They fall in love, get pregnant, and come to the doctor for an abortion he can?t perform. They are sent away unhappy, their fate sealed, forced by custom into an early wedding and an unhappy life.

Doctor Glas hates his role in society, society itself, and sex, which only perpetuates the cycle. "A pregnant woman is a frightful object," he writes in the diary that comprises the novel. "A new-born child is loathsome. A deathbed rarely makes so horrible an impression as childbirth, that terrible symphony of screams and filth and blood." His own private life is hardly more content than that of the people he sees; "Nothing so reduces and drags down a human being as the consciousness of not being loved."

Welcome to Sweden, ladies and gentlemen, where dark nights of the soul can last for six months. To read Soderberg's novel is to get a glimpse of the culture that gave birth to August Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman; it even has a thunderingly obvious image in it, a clock without hands — Oh my God! We're running out of time! — that Bergman used to similarly clumsy effect in Wild Strawberries. It puts us in a world of chilly emotions and wintry despair and, for all that, it's rather surprisingly effective.

Like most cynics, Glas is a disappointed romantic, a man who never got over his first unconsummated love, and who nourishes fantasies of himself as a hero and protector of damsels in distress — a lovelorn catcher in the rye.

Into his life steps the young and beautiful Helga, who wants the doctor to keep her much older husband from having sex with her. Naturally, Glas is sympathetic; besides, her husband is the Lutheran minister Gregorious, whom Glas loathes, seeing religion as a crippling social institution and the minister as an odious fraud. Helga is not frigid; she is only cold to her husband because she has fallen in love with the younger and handsomer Klas Recke, who is everything Gregorious is not. Glas now sees a chance where he can help someone and get away with it. His initial effort to stem Gregorius' lust — by telling him that Helga's health won't take it — comes to nothing, as the gregarious Gregorius isn't about to give up the booty. Eventually, he manages to convince Gregorius that his health requires him to take an extended trip, alone, to a faraway town. Helga's affair with Klas, for the time being, proceeds unimpeded.

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