In her introduction to this reissued paperback edition, the novelist Margaret Atwood rightly points out that while Doctor Glas was controversial in its day — due to "the perception that it was advocating abortion and euthanasia, and was perhaps even rationalizing murder" — it is "not a polemic, not a work of advocacy." Considering that Glas is so completely cynical — he even takes cruel delight in learning that a pregnancy he could have prevented has produced a mentally retarded child — one could almost argue that Soderberg only undercuts the liberal opinions he puts in the mouth of his character. There are equal parts bitter truth and mere bitterness to Glas. He hates religion and belief in God, yet his discomfort in life comes from evolution, which only makes "everything seem meaningless, stupid, squalid." He's a 19th Century man who has been assaulted by the 20th.

"Hell is other people," Jean-Paul Sartre would write nearly 40 years after this book. Doctor Glas would tell him that's only half the story: hell is other people and none, the pain of others, the pain of loneliness, each feeding on the other. The chilly world-weariness and sexual dysfunction of Soderberg's novel found their best expression in the works of Ibsen and Strindberg, and while this book doesn't have quite their force or complexity, it's a lean work of pure Scandinavian gloom, peering out on a tumultuous, thoroughly Freudian century ahead.