The Roofing Ceremony is a powerful, ultimately hopeful short novel that will revise the narrow view of August Strindberg as merely a misogynist and the gloomiest of Scandinavian writers. This novel has an inwardness, irreducibly and complexly human, that looks back to Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and forward to Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.

Published in Sweden in 1906 and never before translated into English, The Roofing Ceremony (Taklagsol) anticipates in its turbulent intensity the chamber plays Strindberg was soon to write. It is about a dying man, once an...