In choosing to write his novel - which won Sweden's August Prize last year - from the point of view of a character in another, classic, work of Swedish fiction, Hjalmar Soderberg's Doctor Glas, Ohlsson has taken a considerable risk. This is not only because novels that, as Margaret Atwood puts it in her introduction, “snitch” characters from other novels inevitably have to stand the test of comparison with the work they have snitched them from, but because the character in question is so remarkably unattractive.

Fat, sweaty and middle-aged Pastor Gregorius is made doubly repulsive - here and in Soderberg's original novel - by the fact that he is driven by lust for a much younger woman. This is Helga, whom he meets when she is only 12, and eventually marries, after his first wife conveniently dies. In Doctor Glas, the eponymous narrator is so revolted by the knowledge that the woman he loves is being forced to suffer the sexual attentions of her loathsome husband that he murders him. Gregorius reimagines the story from the doomed clergyman's perspective.

Through the medium of the first-person narrative, even the most dubious characters can be made to seem sympathetic, but Ohlsson succeeds only partially. His novel, although undoubtedly accomplished, is a bit of an oddity - a work whose characters are all so unappealing, that one looks forward to the end.

Gregorius by Bengt Ohlsson, translated by Silvester Mazzarella
Portobello, £9.99

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