«Shyness and Dignity is one of the major works of Nordic literature … Each word counts, and even though the novel is only 188 pages long, it is encyclopedically saturated with meaning, references, humour, wisdom and brilliant writing”
6/6 stars, Politiken, Denmark

“Everything is written with a remarkable switching back and forth between razor sharp observation and razor sharp, sensitive reflection. Shyness and Dignity is Dag Solstad at his best, which he almost always is. It’s a wonderful novel … Quite simply, Solstad’s works cannot be recommended strongly enough”
6/6 stars, Berlingske Tidende

“Dag Solstad is the prose champion of Nordic literature … The Norwegian’s casual storytelling shines in this fantastic novel, which is finally available in Danish … It will be strange if this novel from the year 2000 will not be the best novel to be published in Danish in 2017 … His sentences have an incomparable style … casual elegance with a hint of fine ironi”
6/6 stars, Jyllands-Posten, Denmark

“To American readers Dag Solstad is the greatest of them all. That is completely understandable after reading the superior existential and socially conscious novel Shyness and Dignity … Solstad is truly eminent, and Shyness and Dignity is a gem of a novel”
6/6 stars, Kristeligt Dagblad, Denmark

“Dag Solstad’s new novel glows … Above all through the linguistic brilliance with which he renders his main character … The first fifty pages are flawlessly brilliant – I shiver with joy of reading … A lot to ponder over – a good book”
(Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm)

”The first fourtyfive pages of Shyness and Dignity are exceptional. The rest of the novel is very good, but the beginning is something completely out of the ordinary.”
(Mathieu Lindon, Libération, France)

“Through the existensial turmoil of a teacher, Dag Solstad shows how an expertly crafted language and hardhitting thinking becomes literature … The author has perfect command of both his subject and his literary devices; the language is dense, the vocabulary precise, the sentences long and the interpolated clauses numerous, but as a reader you never get lost and never feel bored. On the contrary, with pleasure and trust you allow yourself to be led through the maze of this demanding style, that often reveals a biting humour and an irony which we might be tempted to call Nordic. We are waiting for further translations.”
(Marie Klos, Le Matricule des Anges, France)

“Without division into chapters and almost without paragraphs, Solstad bombards us with words without once losing his breath. He makes Elias Rukla come alive, his inner turmoil and pathetic life, until we almost seem to be inside his head. A remarkable piece of literature.”
(Anne-Marie Genest, Le Libraire, Canada)

“SHYNESS AND DIGNITY is a journey to the end of shame, where a man’s dignity is burnt alive along the way … His life is turned upside down. It’s not pretty, it’s wild. His fall is described with an intensity that younger writers very seldomly possess … He didn’t get the Femina prize for his astonishing novel Shyness and Dignity, but that is hardy something that Dag Solstad gives much thought to, because in his own country, Norway, he has won all the awards there is … and he has been translated into English, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, etc. He has been a key figure on the literary scene in Ibsen’s homeland for years and years, and now that I am discovering this writer (Les Allusifs are the first to publish him in French), I can vividly imagine that he doesn’t give a damn whether he is passed over by the ladies in the Fémina jury … The elegance and the glow of Dag Solstad’s style make him one of the worthy followers of the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, the indisputable master of obsession and raging ruminations.”
(Robert Lévesque, La Presse, Canada)

“With sublime restraint and subtle modulation, Solstad conveys an entire age of sorrow and loss”
(Publishers Weekly)

“There are no dramatic scenes in Shyness and Dignity, no emotional exchanges, no dialogue, only the very occasional recorded remark to illustrate some observation about Elias’s unsatisfactory progress. Inevitably – not least because paragraphs go buttonholingly on for pages – the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard comes to mind and, for all his gentleness of manner and his humane standpoint, Solstad (who was born in 1941) shares Bernhard’s galvanic anger … Dag Solstad’s eminence in Norway is abundantly justified by this profound and courageous study of solitude in society, and despair within enviable security”
(Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement, UK)

“Solstad’s writing is fantastic, with sentence structures ranging from Hemingway…to Faulkner”.
(Emerging Writers Network)

“We are dealing with a story that, in a few pages – barely 140 – equips a character in a novel with a staggering complexity and clearly elucidates Dag Solstad’s ability to manoeuvre the inside of Nordic minds, a maze where the pursuit of happiness ends in a blocked off alley.”
(Que Leer, Spain)

”

“A story in which the crisis of an individual reflects the more extensive crisis of the period, thus extending our focus from the scholastic world to society as a whole.” (Almanacco della scienza, Italy)

“The first fify pages of Shyness and Dignity are extraordinary. The rest of the novel is also very good, but the opening is beyond the ordinary.” (Internazionale, Italy)

“Dag Solstad’s novel Shyness and Dignity, published in 1994 and now adeptly translated into Italian, opens with a perfect story of fifty pages that is almost self-contained.” (Il Sole 24 ore, Italy)

“Dag Solstad composes a requiem for the man without qualities, or rather without the qualities (or disqualities) that count in the world today […]” “a fascinating game of mirrors that recounts the trauma of those who still rely on literature to understand life.” (La Stampa ttL, Italy)

“[…] a book full of meaning that seems to follow in the style of Ibsen, with a protagonist who is himself a minor character in society, a doctor Relling of our times. (…) It is a story in which a whole generation can see itself reflected; the story of the teacher Elias Rukla, who feels out of place in a consumerist and superficial society in which a cultural discourse no longer seems possible and all ideals seem to have been abandoned.” (wuz.it)