Ida Elisabeth, by Sigrid Undset

(Oslo : Aschehoug, 1932, New York : Knopf, 1933.) Ida Elisabeth marries Frithjof, her teenage sweetheart. They get four children together, but only two of them live to grow up. Soon Ida Elisabeth discovers that she has married a real shirker of a man.
When Frithjof embarks on an affair with another woman, Ida Elisabeth [...]

Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol

Dead Souls is a wonderful book, clearly one of the best in world literature (Dead Souls is ranked #21 in Leserglede’s ranking of the best books of all time). Whatever and whereever the soul may or may not be, however, is not the concern of Gogol. His concern, as I read it, is with satire, [...]