A review by davidjames
Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad

4.5

by rights this thing should be an absolute catastrophe. the only properly fleshed out character is the guy who attacks schoolchildren with an umbrella; the other two main characters, such as they are, seem less like real believable people and more like caricatures drawn by an alien trying to pass as a human. and GOD, the writing is exhausting - all long unwieldy rambling sentences which clump together to form paragraphs that regularly last 10 pages at a time. for some reason I haven't been able to work out, it's actually completely hypnotic all the way through, and a weirdly touching discussion of how years of disappointment and tedium can grind away at an ordinary, well-meaning guy.

people who read Hunger and wished the narrator would just get a hot dog and try to act like a human being (and/or that the author wasn't an elitist shithead with ever-increasingly wacky things to say about Hitler), this one's for you.