[Zvmwissq]

(Note: this is an old review I wrote several years ago and only translated (and expanded a bit upon) just now... but since it came up, I figured why not.)

When Hjalmar S?derberg wrote Doctor Glas, the focus was almost entirely on the doctor’s dilemma (which of course, being fiction, had universal appeal.) The case, from the doctor’s perspective, was made pretty clear: Reverend Gregorius is a bad man, Helga is the maiden in distress... does this mean Glas has the right to kill even the most heinous human being to save an innocent?

Ohlsson re-tells the exact same story from the other side – from the perspective of the supposed villain Gregorius - and all of a sudden it seems to become even more complicated. Gregorius still commits the same deeds, still acts the same way, but we get to follow it from inside his head as Ohlsson attempts to make Gregorius as transparent as his aptly-named counterpart. And he does it for a hell of a lot of pages (it’s more than twice the length of Doctor Glas), in a looooong monologue where Gregorius tries to justify his actions. He turns S?derberg’s carefully constructed moral dilemma upside down by making Gregorius into a living, breathing, three-dimensional character who certainly deserves contempt and maybe pity, but probably not hatred and execution.

So far so good. The problem is that like most attempts to make the villain of an allegorical tale more sympathetic, Ohlsson tends to overdo it and throws everything in there – starting with Gregorius’ father disliking him and his brothers teasing him when he was small, and so on. He’s simply too sensitive, you know; that’s why he turned into an oppressive rapist with slight pedo tendencies. (In fact thinking about it now, one could probably get some mileage out of comparing Ohlsson’s Gregorius to Humbert Humbert, both as characters and narrators. Though Ohlsson is no Nabokov.) And as much as I like the idea on principle – more moral complexity is a good thing – I can’t quite get rid of the feeling that as competent a writer as Ohlsson is, it feels more like an experiment in countering an argument (S?derberg’s, that is) than a novel in its own right. The form it takes – one long pseudo-Proustian internal monologue – doesn’t necessarily help either; there’s a lot of “I felt” and “I thought.” Where S?derberg was sharp and succinct, Ohlsson rambles.

Nevertheless, Gregorius is a pretty well-drawn character study, a well-argued defense for the value of every human life that adds some more shades of grey to what might be a slightly black and white moral. S?derberg worked in one era and wrote what he knew, Ohlsson does the same. As fan fiction goes it’s pretty darn impressive, but like all fan fiction it needs the original more than the original needs it.

Now let's see a writer take on Helga's story as well.

3/5.