In the Library
The Red Room
August Strindberg, 1879
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 7 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Ellie Schleussner
- Chapters
- Chapters 30
- Length
- Length 99k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
It was an evening in the beginning of May.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Hunger
Knut Hamsun
Hamsun's Hunger also follows a would-be writer starving in a Nordic capital, but turns the poverty inward where Strindberg turns it into satire.
£1.99
Miss Julie
August Strindberg
Miss Julie does the same thing with class and hypocrisy, but compresses the whole social war into one midsummer night in a kitchen.
£1.99
About the book
In a back room at Berns' restaurant in Stockholm, a knot of broke journalists and painters argue past midnight about art and the lies the city runs on. That is where Arvid Falk turns up, having just torn up a government post he never had to work for, certain he can live on his pen and his convictions alone. Strindberg walks him down through newsrooms that sell opinions to the highest bidder, a charity that spends most of what it collects on itself and little on the poor it claims to serve, and an insurance man running a swindle dressed up as duty. The book's ache is watching Falk's idealism go missing, not in one blow but in a hundred small surrenders, until the boy who quit a sinecure in disgust starts angling for one of his own. Widely called the first modern Swedish novel, it is Strindberg's furious refusal to let his own city look away from itself.