Volume 50, Number 6 · April 10, 2003
Holy Hysteria
By Julian Barnes
The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898
by Pierre Birnbaum, translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd
Hill and Wang, 388 pp., $35.00
In Hjalmar Söderberg's spare and brilliant novel Doctor Glas (1905), the doctor-diarist of the title dines with his friend Markel, a radical journalist. It is a warm summer's day in Stockholm in the late 1890s, and they have telephoned ahead to Hasselbacken, an elegant restaurant in the Djurgard, to reserve a table on the veranda, near the rail. Dressed in their finest, the two men sip aquavit while ordering potage à la chasseur, fillet of plaice, quails, and fruit. They plan their drinking: Chablis, Mumm extra dry, and Manzanilla. All is fashionable, peaceful, and local until this moment:
Review, 3060 words
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