I’ve finished reading Strindberg Plays: One, containing his plays The Father, Miss Julie, and The Ghost Sonata. Takeaways below.

1. Strindberg was a miserable man, and his emotional/physical pains very much dictated his ideas and work. No wonder he felt kin to Nietzsche.
2. Meyer translation seems adequately thoughtful, but his introductions contain far too much biographical detail. One can feel him trying to reverse-engineer the plays and characters by accounting for them historically in Strindberg’s life. It is enlightening insofar as it leads to Takeaway 1 supra, but it’s boring to read and undercuts the creativity of the plays.
3. By contrast, Strindberg’s own preface to Miss Julie is a worthy manifesto (hat tip to Toby for recommending). There are no new ideas in it for anyone who has read Beyond Good and Evil, but it is concise and elegant, if a bit derivative and misinformed.
4. I emerged from reading all three plays more of a Determinist than I was at the outset, though it’s hard to tell how much of that is still the hangover of my reading of The Winter of Our Discontent (Steinbeck) earlier this year. Steinbeck was more persuasive, but Strindberg was more insistent.
5. While Strindberg’s views on gender and class are misguided, his focus on them is certainly not. While his plays fail to resolve tensions adequately, they do a service by bringing those tensions to light. I do not want to be an apologist for his misogyny, but I do find his plays an interesting artifact of an age of great change and anxiety.
6. Where his personal commentary (provided by Meyer’s overreaching intros) deals in absolutes, his work is far more open to interpretation through a contemporary reading. I hesitate to throw the baby out with the bath water in these situations.
7. The Ghost Sonata felt, ideologically, like a long walk for a short drink of water, but it is formally quite interesting. It is also successful in its project to “imitate the inconsequent yet transparently logical shape of a dream.”

I tried this with my book club and had a rebellion on my hands after The Father. Reading the other two plays only solidified my suspicion that they were incorrect to cast the work aside.

Recommended, and perhaps I will read some Ibsen soon to see what “better” (supposedly) looks like.

Rating: 7/10