Author photo: Baard Henriksen

SHYNESS AND DIGNITY BECOMES A BESTSELLER IN TURKEY

In 2018 Yapi Kredi published Dag Solstad’s novel “Shyness and Dignity” in Turkey. Two years later, the book has made it into its 10th printrun – 21,000 copies in total. Not bad for a 26-year old novel about Elias Rukla, the school teacher who, shortly after realizing his students’ utter lack of interest in Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck”, breaks down in the school yard when his umbrella won’t open.

This month Yapi Kredi also publishes another classic Solstad novel, the magnificent, but not widely translated “Gymnasium Teacher Pedersen’s Account of the Great Political Awakening That Has Haunted Our Country” from 1982. Bursting with energy and Solstadian irony, Gymnasium Teacher Pedersen … tells the story of a  young man’s way into the marxist movement of the 70s, and how it transformed the lives of everyone involved, until it all came crashing down at the end of the decade.