My private passion

There are the classics that everyone knows of, those that ought to be classics, and then there are the ones that have an individual importance to individual readers - an inspiration maybe, or a reminder of childhood.
"Now I am sitting at my open window, writing - for whom? Not for any friend or mistress. Scarcely for myself, even. I do not read today what I wrote yesterday; nor shall I read this tomorrow. I write simply so my hand can move, my thoughts move of their own accord. I write to kill a sleepless hour. Why can't I sleep? After all, I've committed no crime."
This short, astonishing novel arrived in the mail a couple of years ago, sent by Swedish friends who ferret in secondhand bookstores in search of Swedish books in translation which they think I might like. They were spot-on with this one. Doctor Glas was first published in 1905 and caused a scandal then, in Sweden, for reasons that had to do with its handling of those two scandalous items, sex and death - not to mention their sub-sets, abortion and euthanasia.
The version I have is a tattered paperback from 1970, a reissue of a 1963 translation - published I suppose to coincide with a film based on it, directed incidentally by Mai Zetterling. On the back of my copy are various encomiums, from several magazines - "a masterpiece", "the most remarkable book of the year", and so forth. Still, as far as I know, Doctor Glas has long been out of print, at least in its English version.