The Red Room

Excerpt:
"You're not straight, Arvid; you're not straight."Who, with the exception of Andersson, who was standing behind the door,listening, would not have been touched by those words, spoken by a brother toa brother, fraught with the deepest brotherly sorrow? Even Arvid, accustomedfrom his childhood to believe all men perfect and himself alone unworthy,wondered for a moment whether he was straight or not? And as his education,by efficacious means, had provided him with a highly sensitive conscience, hefound that he really had not been quite straight, or at least quite frank, when heasked his brother the not-altogether candid question as to whether he wasn't ascoundrel."I've come to the conclusion," he said, "that you cheated me out of a part of myinheritance; I've calculated that you charged too much for your inferior boardand your cast-off clothes; I know that I didn't spend all my fortune during myterrible college days, and I believe that you owe me a fairly big sum; I want it
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About Author:
Johan August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography, history, cultural analysis, and politics. A bold experimenter and iconoclast throughout, he explored a wide range of dramatic methods and purposes, from naturalistic tragedy, monodrama, and history plays, to his anticipations of expressionist and surrealist dramatic techniques. From his earliest work, Strindberg developed forms of dramatic action, language, and visual composition so innovative that many were to become technically possible to stage only with the advent of film. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room (1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel.